


The End of Infinity

by FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls



Category: Doctor Strange (2016), Iron Man (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), Thor (Movies)
Genre: <- I WILL MAKE THIS A TAG, (In a weird way), (it's complicated), A lot of that too, Angst, BAMF Loki (Marvel), BAMF Stephen Strange, BAMF Tony Stark, But it's Loki what did you expect, Canon Compliant, Doing its best to be Far From Home compliant, Don't copy to another site, Fluff, Hurt Loki (Marvel), Hurt Peter Parker, Hurt Stephen Strange, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Irondad, Just enough of that, Loki (Marvel) Needs a Hug, Mental Health Issues, Mischief Bro, Morally Ambiguous Character, Multi, Nightmares, Non-Linear Narrative, Oh I guess Imagined does know science whoops, Pepper Potts deserves the universe, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Protective Loki (Marvel), Protective Peter Parker, Protective Tony Stark, Slow Burn, Someone Please Help Loki, Specifically neurolinguistics, Stephen Strange Needs a Hug, Stephen Strange is Actually the Greatest, The multiverse, Time Shenanigans, Time Travel, Tony Stark Has A Heart, a lot of that, multiple actually, shape shifting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-20
Updated: 2020-03-05
Packaged: 2020-03-08 17:38:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 107
Words: 301,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18899449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls/pseuds/FriendlyNeighborhoodFangirls
Summary: In 2023, the battle for the universe has been won. At a cost no one can forget, the fight is over—for all but one.Stephen Strange has an idea. An impossible idea spanning dimensions and timelines, life and death, and the lines of good and evil. But he's played impossible odds before—perhaps he never stopped.All that Loki wanted was to fight, one last time, for the fate of his universe. So when he finds himself fighting for another, crashing into the past, he has a few intended words for the wizard that forced him there.But not before he finds a boy. Or, more accurately, before the boy finds him.Peter Parker had been waiting for the next mission. He just doesn't expect it to come from the future, armed with an impossible story demanding an impossible quest. And he doesn't expect not to be able to tell Mr. Stark.Tony Stark is trying to rebuild from the Civil War, knowing that someday, something will come that he needs to be ready for. And he doesn't know it yet, but two universes are trying to rebuild around him, and that something is already here.Seven Stones. Five dead. Two universes. And one impossible quest to tie it all back together.





	1. Easier Places to Nap

**Author's Note:**

> Hey guys!
> 
> So... I saw Endgame. I'm shocked, in awe, and utterly satisfied, because Marvel Did It. I didn't know how they'd pull it off, but they did. And yet, I am not happy. I don't think I was supposed to be... And thus, I am making myself happy. But the process of doing so is going to be long and complex and very, very angsty--anything new? NOPE! XD I'm so excited. 
> 
> Here's my spiel, before we dive into this! I've taken some creative liberties with characters and timelines and magic systems, because detail is my LIFE and I need some more than is provided by Marvel sometimes. :) But if you see any glaring mistakes, tell me!  
> The same goes for spelling and grammar. If you see one, or are thrown off by a sentence structure or anything like that, TELL ME! There's nothing worse than getting pulled out of a good story by a mistype. :) 
> 
> Just so you know what you're getting into, There Will Be Irondad. Read this for the Irondad, and for the friendship between Loki and Peter. Read this for Stephen's stubbornness. Read this for people LIVING. That's what I'm writing it for. :)))) 
> 
> (Title and part names come from Fall Out Boy's "Last of the Real Ones.") 
> 
> Anyway, thanks for trying this out, and without further ado, let's get to it!

PART ONE: I WAS JUST AN ONLY CHILD OF THE UNIVERSE, AND THEN I FOUND YOU

 

 

 

**Earth-199999:** **_October 2016_ **

The end of summer still didn’t seem real to Peter Parker. It hadn’t yet sunk in, as he swung between dusk-lit alleyways, that there was a mound of homework waiting for his attention.

Demanding it, more like. But it was the start of the year, as of about a month—everything felt new again, and his inertia hadn’t yet run out. It still felt bottomless, that motivation. 

Who knew how long  _ that  _ would last. It seemed to get shorter every semester. God, it was only the start of his sophomore year and he already had senioritis. 

Peter cut the line of his webbing, tucking his legs to his chest. His momentum carried him into an arc, and he dropped into an aerial roll before uncurling to land against the nearest wall. Tech-clad fingers splayed on the concrete, red on grey. 

He wasn’t too high off the ground; Queens still towered in the distance. But he could see over the rooftops before him, the visible leaves of a few lush trees indicating his position at the suburban edge of the city. Peter pivoted against the wall and stuck to the concrete with both hands behind him, facing outward. 

Which wasn’t super comfortable. Peter shifted again, his mind elsewhere.

The day had been good, so far. He’d caught a bike thief, built some stamina, and found a couple of fans. It was nice to know people were at least  _ watching  _ his videos. Peter grinned, flashing the shining metal on his wrists, and pushed off from the building again. 

He let himself fall, twisting backwards to face the sky and swinging his arms in front of him. If there was one thing Peter was certain of, it was that people who flew through cities trying to save people were supposed to look utterly awesome. So, he did his best. And he’d been getting better at it—those two dudes outside the food truck had recognized him, hadn’t they? 

He’d been getting better at a lot of things. And only some of it was thanks to this magnificent suit. 

But even all his practice hadn’t seemed to improve a many things. Peter still didn’t know the fastest ways to get to places. He didn’t know how to best find the people who needed help. He didn’t know how to be everywhere at once, to stop every crime—petty or otherwise—that he came across in the most efficient way. Helping people was hard, harder than anyone seemed to think. 

Sometimes, everything felt hard. School, friends, homework, family, Spider-Man,  _ life.  _ Sometimes, Peter just wanted someone to say,  _ hey, you don’t have to spend three hours on Khan Academy after midnight this time, I’ll help you with differentials.  _ Or even just,  _ follow the F train if you want to get to downtown fast.  _

Peter stuck out his wrist, catching himself out of the air before he splattered onto the pavement below. He swept out in a low arc, yanking on his webbing to gain height and speed before falling into the familiar rhythm of the swing. 

He circled for a while, making his way through the streets and houses at the edge of Queens. He only misjudged one shot, tangling the webbing in the leaves of a solitary aspen and ending up tangled, himself. 

“Do spiders ever get stuck in their webs?” He muttered as he sat between the branches fifteen minutes later, cleaning the ripped and knotted strands off his suit until the StarkTech was pristine again. “We will never speak of this.”

No one had seen, of course. 

(And if they had, Peter very much hoped it wouldn’t end up on social media the next day). 

He leapt to the nearest roof, trotting up one side and down the other as he fiddled with his web-shooter. Sending a stream of netting across the street, Peter twisted physics and flew back into his rhythm. 

Peter scanned the spaces around the double-story apartments and homes as he gained speed. For blocks, he found nothing out of the ordinary, until—there! A guy, sticking a ruler down into a car door, parallel to the vehicle’s window. 

Peter released his web, backflipping so he fell directly on top of the unfortunate car thief. Two quick flicks of his wrist had the man attached to said car and cursing vehemently. 

“Hey buddy,” Spider-Man said, a bit of a grin dusting his face. “Shouldn’t steal cars. It’s bad.”

“It’s my car, dumbass!” The man yanked at the webbing on his hand, and the car alarm exploded into distressed shrieks. 

“Hey!” Windows opened on the buildings above as people leaned out to add their own voices to the chaotic cacophony. “Shut that off!”

The man looked up, irritation furrowing his brow. “Can you tell him it’s my car?”

Peter frowned. “I was—”

Another window opened. “I work at nights, c’mon,” said the inhabitant groggily. 

A woman from the left side of the street added, “that’s not your car! That’s his car.”

_ Just your friendly neighborhood poltergeist, apparently.  _ Peter tried to explain his mistake. “How was I supposed to know it was his? He was shoving that thing in the window—”

Unable to extricate himself from the mess until he’d freed the man and apologized profusely, Peter was soon swinging six times quicker toward the  _ other  _ side of Queens, flushed with embarrassment beneath the mask. 

But the rest of the night went better, apart from a spill on a half-constructed building. By the time Peter’s stomach had started demanding his Delmar’s sandwich and he’d swung to a perch on a brick-built fire-escape, he decided he could qualify this day as a success. 

Peter fished out his sandwich and his phone, setting the latter beside him on the escape. He unwrapped the food with eager, nimble fingers and wasted no time biting into it. 

Yes, today had been a good day. 

School had been… well, school could have gone better. School could always have gone better, though. Ned had brought news of Legos, Peter’d gotten a couple of videos uploaded, and he’d pulled a couple of math questions out of his ass and gotten them correct. Liz had looked  _ breathtakingly  _ gorgeous. And Peter’d finally worked up the courage to back out of Decathlon, swallowing his guilt at abandoning everybody to Flash a mere week before nationals. 

It wasn’t that he  _ wanted  _ to quit the club, really. He loved the team, and robotics, and marching band. But he couldn’t leave the city. 

Peter looked down at his suit, shining crimson and navy. 

He couldn’t leave the city. 

The only one who understood was Ned. Well, sort of—he was the only one who knew Peter well enough to realize there was no point to continued complaining. But even Ned had his moments of irritation, brief as they might be. 

_ Always got that internship… _

Peter sometimes wished that whatever this was—this Spider-Man thing, this voicemails to a bodyguard thing, this pretending to work in the evenings thing—was a little bit more like the internship they all said it was. 

Because he liked Mr. Stark. Most of Peter’s interactions had been with Happy, of course, but the few he’d had directly with the genius had been great. Or at least, he thought they had been. Stark was fun, considerate in a… somewhat abrasive way. And he somehow managed to be serious and blithe at the same time, to watch everything from behind contemplating eyes and an easy grin.

Peter wasn’t sure which part of the man was real. Or if everything was. Or if he was forgetting that human beings were complicated and confusing and had minds and struggles and joys of their own. 

Michelle would scoff  _ ‘ugh, humans’  _ at this point, probably. Peter sighed. 

He thought he was good at pretending. He’d kept Spider-Man a secret for years, after all. 

Some people might disagree. 

Peter took another bite of his sandwich, letting the salty tang of pickles glance of the sides of his tongue. Then he chuckled. “Relishing,” he said out loud, grinning around a mouthful of bread and meat. 

The pun flew off into the empty sky and died. 

“Michelle would be ashamed of me,” Peter sighed, tapping his fingers against the fire-escape beside him. That girl wielded words like Captain America wielded his shield.

Which reminded him. Peter shifted his sandwich into his left hand and tapped open his phone, pulling up the speed-dial number. 

_ “You have reached the voicemail box of:  _ Happy. Hogan.”

Happy’s voice sounded like someone he was required to be polite to had just walked in front of him in the movie theater and then subsequently spilled his popcorn, stolen his drink, and urinated on his shoes. Okay maybe not that last. Who  _ did  _ that?

“Hi Happy!” Peter said, swallowing his next bite of sandwich. “Here’s my report for tonight. I stopped a grand theft bicycle, couldn’t find the owner so I just left a note… I helped this lost, old Dominican lady.” He was babbling now. Ned always called it ‘thinking down the phone line’ when Peter started musing about what the other person was doing instead of considering the words coming out of his mouth. “She was really nice and she bought me a churro. I just feel like I could be doing more, y’know? Just curious when the next  _ real  _ mission's gonna be. So, yeah, just call me back.” 

And after a moment:

“It's Peter. Parker.”

He hung up, tossing the phone in his hand and frowning. “Ugh… why would I tell him about the churro?” 

He knew he sounded like a child on those recordings. No wonder Mr. Stark never heard them, or talked to Peter at all. Peter  _ wasn’t  _ just a kid, he insisted on that, but when he couldn’t seem to contain random words it was hard to prove. 

_ I shouldn’t have to prove it,  _ he thought with a grumble.  _ I’m Spider-Man!  _

Peter reached to grip his sandwich again, but ended up pressing the pin-release on his web-shooter instead. The tiny piece of metal flipped outward, and Peter swung out to grab it.

And it was because he was already sideways, already swinging out for the pin that he saw it: a flash of green in the alleyway behind him, illuminating the bricks for half an instant. 

Peter frowned, cautiously moving toward the alley. 

He didn’t hear the door to the ATM on the street behind him sliding open. 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Two quick webs had Peter slipping around the corner of the alley, suspended slightly above the litter-covered pavement. He cast his eyes along the street, trying to identify something out of the ordinary. Bricks gleamed wet with refuse, and Peter climbed up a little higher as he scouted. 

His gaze settled on a man-shaped bundle of dark fabric laying crumpled against one wall, a single hand visible. The limb was groping, feeling at the bricks as though trying to orient itself.

“Hello?” Peter called, quietly. Voices echoed in alleyways, and he didn’t want to hurt whoever-it-was even more. 

The person groaned, the hand returning to the swath of slightly-iridescent fabric with barely a whisper of perceivable movement. Peter dropped onto the floor of the alley, curling his fingers to brush the button of his web-shooters. 

Something was tickling at him, pulling uncomfortably against his spider-sense. A whisper of realization— _ you’re not supposed to be here.  _

Peter shook his head, pushing the clinging voice to the back of his mind. He turned his attention back to the lump of a figure against the alley wall, creeping closer and keeping his shoulders hunched defensively. 

“No place for a nap, really,” Peter said. “There’s far easier places. More comfortable, too, even for vagabonds.”

No answer. Whoever it was moved slightly, and Peter could make out the shapes of its figure in the dim light. The black clothes had the texture of thick leather, almost armor, and they glistened where they weren’t covered with dust or sludge. Peter cast his eyes around for the source of that dust and sludge, but found nothing obvious. Dark hair hung down in front of the figure’s face, pooling on its shoulders and arms. Whoever-it-was had their eyes closed, Peter could make that out, and he wondered if they were even conscious. 

“Hello?” He moved closer, extending a cautious hand to brush the figure’s shoulder.

And the figure  _ shot  _ upright, eyes flying wide, staring at something that wasn’t there. Or that was no longer there. 

_ “Wizard—”  _ he began, before cutting off upon noticing Peter. 

For it was a he. 

Peter Parker jumped back faster than a sparrow taking flight moments before a knife materialized at his throat. 

A knife held by the bloody hand of Prince Loki of Asgard. 

  
  



	2. This Isn't Winning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you haven't already gathered, this story is spoiler-y. And here's where they come in, so look out.
> 
> ENDGAME SPOILERS!
> 
> Okay now you can read it. :)

**Earth-199999:** **_September 2023_ **

 

The funeral was a quiet thing.

Just a few flowers and even fewer words on the pier of the quaint lakehouse, the silence of the sparse onlookers heavier than any speech.

Stephen Strange didn’t move from that pier for a long, long time. Even after the bouquet and the arc reactor—the heart—hidden within it had drifted out into the water and out of sight, even after the Avengers had scattered. Some ambled off to finish the job, some simply ran, some disappeared to wherever they had come from, each hiding from the image of that drifting island of flowers in their own way.

Stephen didn’t allow himself that luxury.

He’d looked back at the window of the house a few times and seen Potts— Stark— _Pepper_ watching the water as though she could still see the wake of the flowers.

She could still feel the ripples. They all could.

Sometimes, she met his eyes, and Stephen couldn’t read a single flicker of the expression on her face. Except when she held Morgan up to the window, too—there was a tear-streaked smile when the girl was in her arms.

Stephen looked away quickly in those moments.

The wind was warm, and the lake rocked with gentle waves. Serene, peaceful, restful.

Just as he would have wanted it.

Stephen shouldn’t know that. He didn’t have any right to know how Anthony Stark had wanted to die, how he had wanted to be celebrated, who he’d wanted to be there, what he’d wanted to be said. Stephen didn’t have any right to know that a large funeral, with the world watching as they had been all the man’s life, had made Stark cringe and laugh incredulously.

It was hard to remember, here on the pier with spiraling thoughts and crumbling walls, to think of the man as Stark. That in this world, in this lifetime, Stephen had never been graced with that small, true smile and the words _‘call me Tony.’_

In this lifetime, Stephen didn’t deserve it.

He swallowed, clasping his trembling hands before him. His feet ached and his legs were itching with a slight sensation of pins and needles, but he couldn’t seem to remember how to move. The sun’s angle had shifted into his eyes and then out again, and Stephen didn’t turn away from the water.  

Footsteps on the dock behind him had him tensing, but Stephen didn’t turn. He knew those footsteps—he shouldn’t, but he’d learned them from years and years of listening, years that no one else had experienced.

Peter Parker was still as ice when he stood next to Stephen. Stiller. Out of the corner of his eye, Stephen could see the flat, dead expression on the boy’s face, the touch of red around his eyes.

“The others have found the parts of the time machine,” Peter said. Parker said. Stephen didn’t know this boy either, not really. “They’re assembling it tomorrow. Then taking the Stones back as soon as they get it calibrated.”

Stephen nodded. “Good,” he said. He tried to keep the tremble from his voice, but he only succeeded in sounding aloof. He didn’t try to speak again.

There was a long pause, the silence broken only by the lap of a particularly strong wave against the old wood of the pier. Stephen imagined the dock warping, twisting like the mirror dimension and slipping down beneath cool, brown water.

“What are you still doing here?” Parker said after a moment.

Stephen closed his eyes.

“Answer me, wizard. _Why are you still here?”_

“Because I’m sorry.” Stephen’s voice was hard. It was either that or no voice at all, either that or a broken whisper.

“No you’re not. You saved everyone, the entire fucking universe,” Parker growled. “Why would _you_ be sorry?”

Stephen’s tone didn’t change. “I didn’t save everyone.”

_He did. And I didn’t save him._

“Collateral damage.”

“I’m sorry.”

For a moment, Stephen thought Parker was going to strike him, that the rubber-band of tolerance within the teenager had finally snapped of grief and fury and pain.

But the boy only snarled, _“You don’t get to be sorry!”_ The words hissed out between his teeth. “You don’t get to stand here and mourn, you don’t get to stand here and pretend like you know. Like you knew him. Like you knew _anything.”_

Stephen’s hands shook harder.

“I don’t care if this was the only way, _wizard.”_ Parker gesticulated wildly, indicating the lake, the house, Pepper and Morgan and Happy in the window, Harley Keener on the porch. None of them were speaking. None of them were seeing—they just gazed emptily at their child, their plastic screw-driver, their watch, their hands. “Because this isn’t winning.”

_‘Stop. Stop wallowing in self-pity, Stephen. We’re going to win this.’_

_‘What does that even mean? What’s winning in this scenario? They’re all dead already, Tony.’_

_‘Maybe they are. But we can fix it—we have to. Winning is… Pepper and Peter and my whole family, makeshift or otherwise. Winning is them alive, them watching Thanos’s fucking sunset on a grateful universe. I’d die to give them that.’_

_‘Me too.’_

_‘Shut up, wizard—you’re not allowed to.’_

_‘And why not?’_

_‘Because you’re part of my makeshift family, ever think of that?’_

Stark had said those words in eleven million futures. Or something like them. Millions and millions of times, he’d told Stephen or Rhodey or Carol or Sam or Natasha or Steve or Bruce that this, _this,_ was winning.

Stephen hadn’t believed him those millions of times. And he didn’t believe him now.

Parker growled again. “This. Isn’t. Winning.”

Stephen could tell him he knew this could never be. But that would be a lie, and he’d done enough lying to this boy. So he didn’t say anything, and he didn’t look at Parker beside him, glad in his petite black suit with his hair slightly tousled from the hours since the ceremony.

He knew what he’d see. Devastation, pure and unhidden, devastation twisting into a helpless sort of rage. Stephen felt the same concoction of instability churning within him, too.

Peter Parker had gotten so little time with Stark in this universe. But even in those few moments, he’d tuned into the consistency between them, the consistency that persevered through every timeline Stephen had seen.

Stephen was no longer confused as to the relationship between them. He’d seen it play out in millions of ways.

It would never get to play out here, anymore, and Stephen mourned that almost as much as he mourned Stark himself.

“You chose wrong. You saw ten million timelines and you _chose wrong.”_

_I know._

Morgan and Peter deserved their father. Pepper deserved her husband. This world deserved Tony Stark.

_I know._

“What else could I have chosen?”

Stephen didn’t mean to speak aloud, but the words slipped out on the end of a breath and it was too late to hide them. He already knew the answer, anyway.

“Something. Anything. _You could have chosen differently.”_

“I—”

“No. You could have. But you were willing to trade him, you were willing to let him make the sacrifice. _You._ ” Parker spat the last word like a curse, his tone saturated with disgust. “A coward, that’s all you are!”

It stung, of course it did, but not as much as the boy would have wanted. Because Stephen had heard this before. Seven hundred and ninety times, Stephen had heard this before. Shifted and different each time, but the tone was the same. The grief was the same. The hate was the same.

Stephen knew the hate wasn’t for him, not really. He knew what Peter was thinking, he knew all the boy needed was for someone to wrap their arms around him and tell him that everything was going to be okay.

In a single future, Stephen had been that person.

Not here.

“Peter?”

Parker turned at Pepper’s call, and Stephen did too, after a moment.

Pepper met his eyes, the same unreadability flashing across them as there’d been every time she’d looked at him from the window. Then her gaze skated to the boy beside him, and softened, just slightly.

“C’mon, kid,” she said. “You’re aunt’s inside.”

Parker didn’t move.

“Peter…” It came out on the end of a sigh. “I get it. I really do. But this isn’t helping anyone, okay?”

 _‘You don’t mean it’_ went unspoken.

Pepper smiled softly. “Leave Strange be.”

Parker’s head dropped, all wrath seeping away into exhaustion. His feet seemed to drag of their own accord, drawing him off the pier and to Pepper’s side, and he never looked back at Stephen.

This time, Stephen didn’t know what he would have seen on the boy’s face if he had.

The two of them disappeared back into the house, and Stephen turned away. His muscles flooded with the warm ache of movement after so long, but he only stilled them again as he focused back on the water.

He’d been there for a long time.

They were taking the Stones back tomorrow. And that’d be it. Everything would be over, everything would be set _right._ And Stark would never see it, though he would have wanted to most of all.

The sun kept creeping across the sky, and Stephen watched the reflections of the trees shift in angle and length. He watched his shadow fall across the water. But he didn’t see any of it, not truly.

He wanted Parker to come back. He thought he knew what he’d say to the boy, this time. He thought he might understand how to explain. Maybe. He wanted to try.

Because if he could make Peter understand...

He’d had been standing at that lake for a long time. He stayed there for a long time yet.

And then something pulled on his wrist, a small hand already calloused from play and tinkering.

It took every ounce of Stephen’s strength to look down at Morgan Stark beneath him.

The girl peered up at him with solemn, whiskey-brown eyes and said quietly, “Mommy said you can come in.”

Stephen’s throat worked for a long moment before he coughed out, “did she send you out to say that?”

Morgan shook her head. “She was going to tell you, but she looked sad. So I’m doing it.”

“Well,” Stephen said through a mouthful of dust, “that was very kind of you.”

“What are you doing out here, anyway?”

The question wasn’t like Peter’s. It didn’t have an answer from the girl; it was supposed to be answered by Stephen. She was simply curious, after all.

She didn’t know who he was. She didn’t know what he’d done.

He looked back at the lake, closing his eyes. Morgan hadn’t let go of his wrist. “I was just thinking about Stark, that’s all. Your—your daddy.”

“You’ve been out here a long time,” the girl observed. “Are you his friend?”

_In twelve million futures of dust and pain, where you never existed, yes. In every future where neither of us died before we could speak more than fifty words to each other, yes. He told me I was like him, and I told him I could never be—me, as perceptive, as brave, as selfless? I could never be._

“I don’t know,” Stephen replied honestly. He looked down at Morgan, and she smiled a bit when he did. He could see the gap in it where she’d lost a tooth—perhaps her very first one.

“You can be my friend,” the girl said easily.

Something inside of Stephen shattered.

_I did it. I did it, I chose it, it was me, it was my fault._

_I killed Tony Stark._

“No, Morgan,” he said softly. “I don’t think you want that.”

  
  
  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephen be angstin'.
> 
> He does that. Get used to it. XD
> 
> Hope you enjoyed this friendly dose of pain and suffering, and I'll see you soon! Drop me a kudos or a comment, and have a great time-zone sensitive time classification.


	3. From 'What the Fuck' to 'Fucked'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Back to the past!

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Peter’s instincts were faster than most cobras’, which was probably the only reason he wasn’t bleeding out on the alley pavement at that moment. As it was, he was rolling sideways, one wrist sending webbing toward his attacker and the other attaching to the ledge of the roof above.

He swung up, twisting in midair to face the man—the _god—_ beneath him. Loki’s knife cut through the air without a sound, wickedly triangular and glimmering with magic. He lunged after Peter, who rose higher, torn between aggression and awe. Because Loki, the God of Mischief and the Prince of Asgard, was bleeding and attacking him in a Queens’ alleyway.

He wasted no time barraging with his webbing, sending stream after stream of the stuff at the invading god. But Loki seemed to flicker in and out of existence, and Peter’s strikes failed to make contact as the god multiplied and phased like a twisted version of the Vision. Loki hurled that knife again and again, the weapon flashing in the dim light, but it always rematerialized in his hand before Peter could do _anything._

Always the same hand. The other was tucked to the man’s chest, fingers curled around something so tightly his knuckles had turned white.

Distracted, Peter didn’t see the next throw before it was slicing across his thigh, parting the StarkTech like butter.

Impossible.

And fucking _painful._

Peter yelped, dancing back and shifting his weight off his injured leg. It wasn’t deep, especially to an unenhanced individual—but those same enhancements made the sting all the sharper. He shook out the tingle of pain, easier to ignore once the first twinge had passed.

“Not cool.” Peter swung forward again, then released himself into an arcing leap, both hands extended toward Loki. The two strands of webbing made direct hits—on where the god _had_ been.

_Damn it!_

All the multiplying was cheating, Peter decided. Could he get his webbing to split?

 _Not without a significant modification to the web-shooters,_ said his eternally-helpful, always-relevant engineer brain.

Loki lunged again, and Peter just barely managed to deflect the strike.

_Right, focusing._

“Dude, what are you even doing here?” Peter wondered, flipping backward to avoid another thrust of that knife.

Loki didn’t answer, his gaze wild and… pained?

What was going on?

Peter flipped over the god’s head, not attacking this time. Just scouting, as he probably should have done long before. There was sweat and blood on Loki’s face, and he moved… strangely. Like someone who’d just come off a trampoline, disoriented, the ground and air feeling wrong.

Peter still felt wrong, still felt that voice whispering, _not here, you don’t belong here._ But maybe that was a result of the god, something residual from his magic?

“Um, Mr. Loki sir?” Peter tried again, swinging a bit higher and trying to look non-threatening. “Pretty sure I shouldn’t be asking this to someone who tired to obliterate the human race multiple times, but are you alright?”

Loki stopped moving now that Peter had stayed put, focusing irritably on the boy. His sharp green eyes were clearing, just a bit—and darkening. Like they’d been shining with something, before, which was now going out.

Peter frowned. The lighting of the alley hadn’t changed…

He kept his fingers on the buttons of his web-shooters.

Slowly, his eyes still locked on Peter, Loki brought his curled hand up, unfurling it slightly. Peter tried to glimpse the contents, and thought he saw a glimmer of green light through the god’s fingers before Loki had snapped his grip shut again. Peter’s enhanced ears caught the crinkle of paper.

They stared at each other for a long, long moment.

And then, to Peter’s eternal shock, the man’s knife dissolved.

“You’re the Spider-Man, aren’t you,” Loki said with a long-suffering sigh.

“Um… yes?” Peter’s cautious reply sounded a bit tinny, even to his own ears.

“The Spider- _Kid._ Oh, fuck that Midgardian wizard and everything he represents!”

Peter’s brow furrowed, his confusion ticking up a few more notches. Wizard? Loki, knowing his name? Loki, in New York again, _not_ actively trying to kill him?

Peter was starting to think he should call Happy again.

“Hello, Peter Parker.”

Peter lost his grip on the webbing in shock.

And then he was on his feet again, wrists extended, hastily trying to cover up the breach of identity, to do _anything._ “What do you want?” he hissed. “If you so much as _touch_ my aunt I’ll—”

“Calm yourself, small spider,” said the god, raising his hands and spreading them in the universal _‘I’m unarmed’_ position. Except the image was largely ruined by the fact that he only spread one hand—the other still clutched around the mystery light and enigma paper. “I mean no harm.”

Peter gestured to his leg, and then to the skyline of Queens. “Excuse me if I doubt that.”

Loki winced—he actually _winced._ “Wounding you was not my intention. And 2012 was… not what you think.”

“Oh? So you didn’t kill hundreds of people, steal two powerful relics, bring an alien army into my city, or send Tony Stark into a wormhole?” Peter crossed his arms—though he kept his wrist facing outward, ready to retreat or attack.

Something unreadable flickered in Loki’s eyes at Peter’s last point, and the god’s gaze flicked to the paper in his hand for an instant. Peter’s eyes narrowed.

“Stark did the wormhole thing all on his own, I’m sure,” Loki said, lowering his hands.

Peter tensed, and the god chuckled.

“Listen, let us accept that I could kill you in seconds, regardless of position or proximity, and also accept the fact that I am not. The proceeding events will go much smoother if we do so.”

Peter bristled. “I think you’d be surprised.”

“Want to test this?” Loki smirked.

“Not remotely. I want you to tell me what the _hell_ you’re doing here and how you know my name.” He narrowed the eyes of the suit. “And while you’re at it, explain what nefarious plans you’re cooking up… wherever you come from.”

Loki huffed, expression thoughtful. “Nefarious plans. I rather like that. But unfortunately I lack them; this trip was somewhat _unplanned._ ”

“What _trip?_ What are you _doing here?”_ Peter was vibrating with anxious, impatient energy now, and his finger tapped rapidly against the button at his wrist.

“I’m from the future.”

Peter would have fallen off his webbing again, if he hadn’t already done so. _“What?”_

“Was that unclear?”

“Was that— _you’re from the future?_ But that’s— you can’t—”

“It’s not impossible, actually—”

“That’s so fucking cool!”

Loki looked taken aback, his head cocking, a bit like a python’s.

Peter couldn’t help his grin under his mask, because he may be face to face with a dangerous, otherworldly criminal, but it was a dangerous, otherworldly criminal from the _future_ and damn if that didn’t make every one of Peter’s geek alarms slam into overdrive.

“How’d you manage it? How far in the future? Am I still Spider-Man then? Why’d you end up back here? How could you possibly do it by accident? Is that an Asgardian thing—spontaneous time travel?” He found he’d drawn closer to the god, and hurriedly backed away, though his eagerness didn’t quell much.

Loki smiled, a flickering sort of thing that was gone just as soon as it had appeared. But it was a smile, not a smirk, and it surprised both boy and god. “It’s not an Asgardian thing,” Loki said. “It’s a desperate Midgardian wizard thing. I’m only the second link in the chain of time jumps.”

“What? A wizard?”

Loki rubbed his face with one hand, sighing through his nose. His hair was tangled, and it flopped over his fingers as he massaged his temples slowly.

He looked… exhausted.

That didn’t match Peter’s image of the helmeted, scepter-bearing god, the blade shimmering with blood, the aura of magic and _evil_ tangible around him. Peter frowned, moving just a tad closer.

“This is quite a long story, little spider,” Loki said. “But yes. A wizard. A wizard who I met in early 2017—”

“2017!”

“—showed up again later, saying he was from 2023 and telling me Than—telling me we’d lost the battle.”

“Wait hold up.” Peter lifted a hand. “‘We’? Since when is there a we?”

“Since 2017, Parker. Since a battle we apparently lost.”

“What battle? What happened, why you, what’s going on here—”

“I don’t know!” the god snapped. “All I know is that I’ve got an Infinity Stone in my hand and a hasty list of names and that moments before that realm-damned sorcerer showed up, I was supposed to die.”

Peter’s thoughts were racing, a thousand rules and situations and impossibilities slamming into each other and incomprehensible speeds. “So… you’re going back in time to change that?”

Loki looked at him with weary irritation. “It doesn’t work like that, Midgardian.”

Peter thought of every time-travel story he’d ever read or watched.

There were quite a _lot_ of systems of time-travel.

“How does it work, then?” he demanded.

“You can’t go back in time and change the future you just came from—that makes your past your future and forms a loop the universe cannot mend.”

“So, like Doctor Who, not _Back to the Future?”_

The god looked at him blankly.

“Sorry, reference.”

“Explain?”

Peter shuffled awkwardly. “It’s hard to... just describe? I mean, one’s really long and the other’s really old—well, they’re both really old but they both sorta involve time travel and the thing you said matches most with Doctor Who, I suppose.”

“That clears… actually nothing up, mortal.”

“Sorry. Maybe you can watch them, sometime.”

Loki cocked his head again. “Watch? Like one would the mighty theatre?”

“Um… Kind of.”

Loki shook himself, his knife rematerializing. Peter tensed, but the god just flipped it, catching it by its blade and then its handle again. It looked almost anxious. “No matter. If you’re the man of spiders, I have already accomplished a part of my mission—”

Peter, confused, interrupted, “but I thought you couldn’t change the past.”

Loki glared at him, mouth still open. “I’m _not._ I’m changing _your_ past.”

“That actually makes _no_ sense.” Then he paused. “Wait, what d’ya mean an _Infinity Stone?”_

  


Peter crept up the wall of his apartment building, checking periodically behind him to make sure his tail was following at an acceptable distance. Loki climbed with an inhuman grace, and Peter supposed that made sense, seeing as he wasn’t human. It broke every rule in the book for Peter to be turning his back on the god, to be _leading him into his home,_ but Peter’s instincts seemed to encourage it. And if Loki decided to attack…

Well, either Peter’s spider-senses would warn him in time to defend himself, or he never had any chance against the Asgardian anyway.

Carefully, precisely, Peter stuck his fingers to the window to pull it open and slipped inside. He gave Loki the universal shushing gesture, indicating that he say back—which the god did _not_ seem pleased with—and through the window and onto the ceiling of his room. On instinct, he whipped off his mask and let it fall to the floor beneath him as he slowly transversed the bedroom.

May was bustling around in the kitchen, visible through Peter’s open door—he had to fix _that._ There was no way he could bring an Asgardian into his room with the door open.

Well, he probably shouldn’t be bringing an Asgardian into his room _anyway._ Especially not a dangerous criminal one.

From the _future._

What even was his life?

Peter gripped the top corner of the door with a piece of webbing, slowly easing it shut and wincing at the slow _creeeeeak_ that echoed in his enhanced ears. He dropped to the ground, pushing it the final few inches until it latched, and let out a sigh of relief.

_The coast is clear._

Except the coast was _not_ clear.

A Lego death-star shattered on the floor of Peter’s bedroom, and Peter felt his life go from _what the fuck_ to _fucked._

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ned and May are still canonically inconvenient...
> 
> But soon, I get to flip canon to the WIIIIINNNNDDD it's gonna be great. Thanks for reading!


	4. Damn That Wizard

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

As the crash of the breaking Legos faded and Peter looked at his best friend in absolute terror, the silence of the room was broken by May’s call—”What was that?”

“Gah—Nothing! Nothing!” Peter replied, but it his tone was strangled. Shit _, shit_...

“You’re the Spider-Man,” came Ned’s breathless voice. Peter looked at him, then down at his own suit-clad body, then back at Ned’s wide, excited eyes. “From YouTube!”

“I’m not, I’m not,” Peter said, panic in his voice as his gaze darted toward the window, where _Prince Loki of Asgard was going to appear any second._

Ned’s face had gone red from lack of air. “You were on the _ceiling!”_

“No I wasn’t!” Peter frantically tapped his suit, its tension releasing and the fabric pooling around his ankles. He stepped out of it, kicking it aside as quickly as possible. “Ned, what are you doing in my room?”

“May let me in! We were gonna finish the Death Star—”

“You can’t just bust into my room—”

The door opened, and Peter’s panic compounded as May stepped through. She was accompanied by a whirl of smoke and the scent of something burning, which explained the hand towel she waved before her face. “That turkey meatloaf recipe is a disaster,” she said, a laugh in her voice. “Let’s go to dinner. Thai? Ned, you want Thai?”

Ned began to affirm, but Peter’s inward screech of _NO!_ finally had him speaking. “No! Uh, he’s got a thing.”

Ned, bless his soul, immediately amended, “A thing, to do, after.”

Great cover. God, this was going just _spectacularly_ wasn’t it?

Peter glanced at the window again. Flashing green eyes met his, and Peter grimaced, his hands flickering subtly to indicate the people around him.

Loki, to his relief, disappeared from view behind the window.

Peter turned back to May, who was watching his mostly naked form with less confusion than she probably should have. “Maybe put on some clothes,” she said.

Peter closed his eyes and nodded, part of him wanting to disappear from existence and the other part wanting to burst into tears. He fumbled for a shirt, and May shut the door and disappeared.

Only then did he collapse backward against his bed and press the heels of his palms into his eyes. “Fuck…”

“She doesn’t know?” Ned asked, tapping him repeatedly on the shoulder.

Peter swatted his hand away. “No one knows!” he said, pulling the checkered shirt over his head, his curls flopping every-which way. “Well, Mr. Stark knows because he made my suit but that’s it.”

_And, y’know, a time-traveling Loki, Prince of Asgard, God of Mischief. Who is currently hanging onto the windowsill outside my apartment._

“Tony _Stark_ made you that?!?” Fourteen emotions splattered on Ned’s face as one, before dissolving into realization. “Are you an Avenger?”

Peter shrugged. “Yeah. Basically.” It wasn’t _really_ a lie.

Ned’s hands went to his face, his mouth working wordlessly. It would have been endearing if Peter wasn’t so busy being terrified.

“You can’t tell anyone about this,” Peter hissed. “You’ve _got_ to keep it a secret.”

“Secret? Why?” Ned sounded genuinely confused.

Peter gesticulated frantically in the direction of the doorway, and Aunt May. “You know what she's like! If she finds out people try and kill me every night, she’s not gonna let me do this anymore! Come on, Ned, _please.”_

His friend raised both hands, breathing deep. “Okay, okay okay.” And then they dropped, and that goofy smile was back and Ned was speaking _far too loudly—_ “I’m gonna be level with you, I can’t keep this a secret! It’s the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me—”

_No._

“Ned, May _cannot_ know. I _cannot_ do that to her right now. With everything that’s happened with her I—” His voice was trembling, his throat working with the struggle to swallow. “Please.”

“O-okay…” Ned said.

Peter looked at the window again, but saw only the dark bricks of the apartment complex across the street. “Just swear it, okay?”

Ned nodded, giving Peter a small smile. “I swear.”

Peter blew out a long breath, and immediately began shoving his friend toward the door. “Okay, yes, thanks, and now you will be leaving.”

Ned swatted at his hands. “Can I try the suit on? How does it work? Is it magnets?”

“Ned, can you please just—”

“How do you shoot the strings?”

Peter’s spider-senses were tingling, his anxiousness beginning to fuel that voice again— _wrong, wrong, you don’t belong here._ He blamed it on Loki; this was his _room,_ of course he belonged. Perhaps the god did have some sort of aura of magic, and Peter’s senses were picking up on it.

He needed to figure this out. He didn’t have time for Thai or his secret being out or _anything—_ he needed to figure out the goddamn _god_ that was lingering outside his window! “I’m gonna tell you about this at school tomorrow, okay?” he told Ned hurriedly, almost succeeding in shoving the boy out the door before Ned ducked sideways.

“But… how do you do this _and_ the Stark internship?”

Peter didn’t follow for a moment. “This… this is the Stark internship.”

“Oooh…”

Peter pushed Ned through the door with one last extension of his gangly limbs and shut the door firmly behind him. Then he spun, drawing in a long, long breath and sinking down to the floor.

_I can’t believe this is happening right now._

“I take it that is not a normal occurrence,” came a slithering voice from the window.

Peter looked up, propping his chin on his knee and observing Loki as the god folded himself through the gap and settled on the windowsill. “Nope,” he sighed. “It’s the end of the world.”

“I’ve seen that,” Loki said. “There was nowhere near as much yelling.”

Peter huffed a laugh. “Well, that’s a relief…”

They watched each other for a moment, black and green toward red and blue. Peter’s senses were vibrating, his skin itching with agitation, and he didn’t think it was only because of the villain sitting across from him.

Eventually, Peter broke eye contact, running a hand through his curls. “Okay, so my aunt is gonna kidnap me in a few minutes to go for food. I can’t extricate myself from these—trust me, I’ve tried. She’ll get even more suspicious and I— _we_ can’t afford more suspicion right now…”

“Agreed.”

They stared at each other some more.

“Okay, this is crazy, this is _absolutely crazy…_ I should call Happy, I should call Mr. Stark, I should do _something—”_

“No!”

Peter broke off, his mouth still half open.

Loki was on his feet, his hand extended, those fisted fingers going white again. There was something like fear in his emerald eyes, something far too _human._ Slowly, the god dropped his arm back to his side, glaring at Peter as if daring him to say anything.

“It’s perfectly logical not to trust me,” Loki said, tapping the edge of one boot against Peter’s floor. “It’s perfectly logical to try and kill me. But we’ve accomplished far more without doing so, wouldn’t you agree?”

“Not really? Seeing as I still have no idea what happened or what you’re doing here.”

Loki sat again, crossing his legs on the windowsill. “I’ll explain everything. I’d just prefer not to do it from a SHIELD holding cell. And I’d definitely prefer not to be dead.”

“I’m sure they’d listen…”

Loki raised an eyebrow, and Peter trailed off.

“Okay, maybe you’re right,” Peter said. “But you did kill a lot of people. And attempt to kill a great many more.”

Loki waved a hand. “All part of the explanation, little spider. Just… don’t call Stark. Not yet.”

Peter sighed, reluctantly nodding. “Okay. Fine. But only because my spidey-senses say you aren’t a threat… and he probably wouldn’t answer me anyway.”

Loki peered at him. “What?”

“I have to go through Happy Hogan.”

“Who?”

“Happy Hogan. One doesn’t just _call_ Tony Stark.”

Loki’s brow furrowed further. “Even you?”

“What do you mean ‘even me?’”

Now it was Loki’s turn to run a hand through his hair. “Apparently this is going to be even _harder_ than I thought.”

Peter opened his mouth to ask another question, but May’s voice filtered through the door once again. “Pete? Is Ned still in there? I though he left!”

Peter jumped up, whirling toward the door on the off chance she tried to come in. “Yeah, he’s gone. I was just… using voice-type.”

“Alright… are you ready to go?”

Peter looked back at the God of Mischief and sighed. “Yes, Aunt May. I’m coming.”

* * *

 

Loki Odinson had very little experience with being alone in a teenage Midgardian’s room.

It wasn’t that different from a teenage Asgardian’s room, actually, but it was the atmosphere that counted. The Spider-Child had instructed—ordered, he’d dared to _order_ Loki—not to touch anything.

 Part of Loki wanted to pettily shift everything just an inch to the left of its normal position, just to see if the child noticed. But even that part had to reluctantly admit that he needed the boy’s help, and it would be unwise to antagonize him.

Still, Loki wanted to antagonize _something._

Instead, he folded himself around his knees, sitting sideways in the window and pretending his entire form didn’t ache with something nonphysical. He pretended not to think about Thanos and the ship and the blood on his form and the blood of his people. He pretended not to think about Valkyrie or Bruce, pretended not to think of Heimdall.

Pretended not to think of Thor.

Loki snarled at the empty window frame across from him, running the knuckles of his fisted hand down the wicked edge of his knife. He was the trickster god, the lord of mischief—he did not mourn.

Damn that wizard to Helheim and back!

Sighing, Loki let his knife drop out of existence and brought his fist to his chest. He unfolded the aching fingers, bending them repeatedly to try and work some feeling back into the tendons as he glared at the contents of his palm.

The Time Stone was an ugly shade of green. It was lime— _lime,_ or _spring grass,_ or something just as idiotic. Loki preferred pine tones, or a nice, deep emerald. Not this awkward wannabe color; he’d leave that for Doctor Strange—or whatever his real name was.  

But here it was, floating slightly above his hand as though surrounded by a shield of air he couldn’t cut through. Protecting him, probably, like the casing of the Tesseract or the bulb of his scepter.

Ultimate power, right in his palm.

And Loki wanted nothing more than to destroy it forever.

Carefully, Loki shifted the Stone onto his knee, watching it turn lazily a centimeter above his clothes. It’s soft glow was comfortable, inviting.

Loki snarled at it, too.

Then he went back to his palm, peeling the piece of paper, now damp from his sweat, from his skin. With infinite precision—this hasty scroll was just as important as the Stone, if not more—Loki unfolded it along its shaky crease lines.

The wizard had said he’d hopefully recognize most of these names.       

The wizard had far too much hope.

The note was a web of names and arrows, each indicating a person or relationship supposedly essential to saving the world. Loki glanced over the frankly _enormous_ list, and tried to ignore the way his chest sunk with despair.

Half of those people wanted to kill him on sight.

And the other half he didn’t even know. Who in the nine realms was Peter Quill? What kind of a name was ‘T’Challa’?

And why did ‘Anthony Stark’ have to be the name in the center of it all?

Loki glared at the Time Stone again, and thought he could see his own reflection in the glowing center.

He couldn’t do this.

It felt like sand shredding his windpipe to admit it, but he _couldn’t_ do this. It wasn’t as though he’d had a choice; the wizard had trapped him, tricked him, played on what honor he had and twisted what loyalty was left.

Still, Loki wanted to do save the world. Odin, he wanted to with every synapse of his corroding form, but he couldn’t. Making these people listen to him, making them trust him, trust each other… Impossible. Maybe someone else could have done it, but not Loki, villain, God of Mischief and Lord of Trickery. Not Loki, plotting evil and jealous brother.

The wizard should have saved someone else.

Loki clasped the note between his knees, fisting both hands in his hair and growling, long and drawn out. Asgardian curses mumbled from angry lips bounced off the walls. He wanted to stab something—specifically the sorcerer who’d forced him here.  Who’d forced him to abandon his universe and his people to the hands of the Mad Titan.

Who’d forced him to abandon his brother.

_‘It has to be you.’_

Apparently, Loki was the only one the wizard could save without damaging the timeline. Apparently, he’d been the only one _salvageable._ So here he was, with a seventh Infinity Stone and a crumpled note spelling the demise of not one, but two timelines.

Loki’d thought one of the arrows on that fucking piece of paper would be easy. But apparently Tony Stark wouldn’t even speak to the boy who was supposed to be his child.

They were all as good as dead. Thanos had as good as come already.

And Loki, forced to alter the past and split the timeline, was trapped in a new universe, an alternate world no longer his own.

With an impossible task to merge the two together.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOOOOO shenanigans. 
> 
> Also I'd never written from Loki's perspective before and I had NO IDEA what I was missing. 10/10 would recommend, most satisfying POV ever.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Leave a comment if you have time or a kudos if you feel I deserve it, and I'll see you in a bit!


	5. More Conventional Things

**Earth-199999:** **_September 2023_ **

It wasn’t sudden, the realization. 

No, it crept up on Stephen like the night over the Appalachians, slowly burrowing into his consciousness as he sat at the Starks’ dinner table and chewed on a cheeseburger. It crept up as he watched Morgan devour hers—the only one of them making any sound. It crept up as he watched Pepper stare at nothing. It crept up as he watched Peter pointedly not look at him.

It crept up in the silence, until Stephen’s weak hands dropped his meal with a thump onto his plate. Until he closed his eyes and tried to breathe.

_ I have to fix this. _

That was all, that was it. No ideas, no determination. Just understanding, finally clicking into place. 

_ I have to do something. _

That was why he was here, wasn’t it? Why he hadn’t moved to help with the time machine, why he hadn’t left to return to the Sanctum? That was what had rooted him to the pier for hours, tying him into a promise he wasn’t even aware he was making?

Stephen stood up. 

It took a fraction of a second too long for anyone else to look up. And that only slipped Stephen from understanding to conviction. 

Pepper met Stephen’s eyes, her hand drifting over to cover Morgan’s. 

“Strange?” she said, her voice deafening in the clinging silence. 

Stephen swallowed. “I have…”

What? An idea?

“To go.”

Morgan looked up, first at Pepper, and then at Stephen. She frowned, looking genuinely disappointed. Pepper’s hand tightened on the girl’s, tapping in a precise rhythm Stephen thought might be morse code.

No one spoke for eleven heartbeats. Stephen was counting. 

“Alright,” said Pepper, nodding as though she understood. Maybe she did.

“Thank you,” Stephen murmured. He inclined his head to the woman, his hands trembling at his sides. 

“Of course.” She nodded back at him. 

Stephen fled before Peter Parker’s glare burned a hole through him. 

He’d brought his sling-ring, but it felt wrong to portal off the land, so Stephen slipped along the side of the driveway until he reached the old paved road leading further upstate. Though that depended, he supposed, on which way you turned. 

Stephen fished his ring out of the pocket of his sleek, black suit and carefully slipped it onto his shaking fingers. It took a few tries—it always did—but once he had it tucked comfortably against his knuckles, portaling took little effort at all.

He stepped directly into the library. Wong and the rest of the Masters would be at Kamar-Taj, likely, but Stephen didn’t want to risk running into anyone in the hallway or the medical center. They’d have questions; so many questions,  _ too many  _ questions that Stephen hardly knew the answers to, either. 

Quietly slipping into the dusty shelves of the library, Stephen wondered where the Cloak had gotten off to. It always seemed to know when Stephen arrived in the Santums and would make its way to him with varying urgency, which had saved the sorcerer’s life more than once. 

His eyes darting over the spines of the tomes, Stephen bit his bottom lip and tried not to glare. 

_ I have to do something.  _

Something. Anything. But there was nothing to do, nothing he could do—the Stones had been destroyed, the timeline set right…

Except. Not yet. 

They were taking the Stones back tomorrow. 

Stephen drew a sharp breath, already racing toward the forbidden books in the back of the library. Tomorrow,  _ tomorrow— _ he had time. 

Almost no time at all, time with little hope, time he didn’t know what to do with, but time he couldn’t waste.

_ Time.  _

  
  


Seven hours later, Stephen tapped his pen against his astral form’s knee, peering at his shakey handwriting. 

“So time is a tier of the multiverse,” he murmured under his breath. The Cloak looked up at him—or, as much as it could. Stephen glanced at it.

“Right? One of the axes of our 4D universe. Position, time, energy, form.”

The Cloak bobbed in affirmation. 

“Time manifests mostly in tiers. It’s like the mortar between the dimensions, securing the 3D facets of our multiverse together.”

Another bob.

“So when you draw on the time of your dimension… you’re splitting said dimension. A timeline is the same thing as an alternate, parallel universe.”

The Cloak cocked its collar, wavering its corners in the universal  _ kind of  _ gesture. 

“You don’t always split the dimension, though.”

A nod.

“Right. Because the past is, for the time-travelers, the future. You can go back, doing things that fit into the timeline—because at that point, they’ve already happened. Like taking a book, or an Infinity Stone, and then returning it—you don’t fuck with events that have already happened. You might even be able to talk to yourself or another person without splitting the dimension, as long as that person doesn’t change their behavior because of what you said. To a certain degree, the universe will mend itself around your existence, making your actions  _ part  _ of the original timeline. But as soon as you start changing things…”

The Cloak drew its corners apart. 

“A split.” Stephen began to sketch, his lines wavering and awkward. “So by taking the Stones the way they did, our Avengers splintered our timeline in… four distinct locations. It could be ten, but they’re taking the Stones back to the moments they were taken to heal those six splits before they can begin. Because we can’t just abandon those splits—they were born of our timeline, and they’re inhabited by living beings… if we save our universe at the expense of another, it isn’t really saving anything.”

Stephen flipped his parchment over, beginning to write again. “So I can’t take the Time Stone from Rogers, because that would doom an alternate timeline.”

The Cloak looked up sharply. 

Stephen watched it as it gesticulated, raising an eyebrow. 

“Of course this is about Stark,” Stephen said when it had finished. “What did you think we were here for?”

  
  


They found Stephen’s physical form the next morning, on the floor, walls of books stacked up around him and the Cloak bringing ever more. They found his astral form moving hundreds of times faster, a pen clutched determinedly between its trembling fingers. 

“Strange,” Wong said, kneeling next to him and entering his own astral form. 

“Wong.” Stephen didn’t look up from the parchment before him, still scribbling.

“Come back, alright? You’ve been out of your body for… who knows how long. Too long.  _ Again.” _

Stephen shook his head. “I can’t. I’ve almost got it.”

Wong narrowed his eyes. “Got what?”

When Stephen looked up, his grin was broken and blazing. “An idea.”

  
  


Stephen dropped his pen, his eyes widening beneath some semblance of a smile.

“Thanos,” he said quietly, triumphantly.

The Cloak dropped its books, zooming up an energy level to enter its own astral form and wrap about Stephen. He smiled at its eagerness, stroking its corners and pointing toward the shaky diagram on his knees. 

“He destroyed the Stones, correct? In 2018. We’ve gone five years without the Stones.” Stephen didn’t wait for the Cloak to confirm.  _ “Supposedly.  _ Because our timeline is unstable. It was so easy for the Avengers to split it; this dimension was already weakened from the Desolation and the fact that it lacked the stabilization of Infinity Stones. The Stones hold so much energy—when you destroy them, where do you think it goes?”

The Cloak shivered. 

“Exactly. Into the fabric of our reality. The Infinity Stones are housing units for that energy, enough energy to tear the dimension apart, or put it back together again. Destroying a Stone destroys the protection and organization our universe has around that Stone’s makeup. Time. Soul. Mind. All of that.”

The Cloak drifted off of Stephen, circling him and looking confused.

“If you destroy one Stone, the universe is off-balance. If you destroy all of them, it should become immobile—sort of hardened to the rest of the energies of the multiverse.” Stephen tapped a page of the book next to him, reading out;  _ “the Infynity Crystals cent’r the six aspeckts of our Realm, concentrating the ingredients of a reality into something tangyble. Without those folk, our universe becometh stagnant and safe.” _

Stephen was excited, now, his words pouring out over each other and his thoughts clamoring for attention. “Do you see? Once the Stones are destroyed, Mind, Soul, Power, Time, Space, and Reality cannot be manipulated as easily because their energies have been distributed throughout the universe, in their natural state, instead of concentrated within ingots.”

The Cloak cocked its collar. 

Stephen smirked, one corner of his lip pulling up. “So the question becomes, then, why was it so easy for the Avengers to twist time? Why was it possible for them to cause changes to the past to make those four splits I was talking about earlier? Why is this timeline still malleable, still innovative?”

The Cloak drifted back in something that could have been shock, and Stephen nodded.

“Because maybe not all the Infinity Stones were destroyed. Maybe instead of simultaneously destroying all the Stones, Thanos used one to destroy the others. Maybe he didn’t even realize he’d done so, for that single Stone jumped timestreams to arrive somewhere else as soon as he’d finished with it.”

And ‘maybe’ was all the timeline needed. If it was possible, the universe could mend around it—Thanos  _ could have  _ destroyed just five Stones, and therefore time-traveling to make it so would not split the timeline. 

Stephen got to his feet, slipping out of his astral form and slamming into his physical one. Twelve hours of dissociating hit him hard—his hands beginning to ache and his head screaming with a splitting, aura migraine— but Stephen simply shoved himself upright and stumbled out of the library catacombs. The Cloak wrapped around him, steading him, and they made their way out of the shelves together. 

“What time is it?” Stephen wondered, fumbling for his watch in yet another suit pocket. 

The Cloak shrugged. 

His hands practically vibrating, Stephen had to grip his wrist to make out the time as he palmed his watch. It was nearly six o’clock in the morning; he wasn’t too late, not yet. 

Stephen ignored the conventions of respect and portaled directly into the Starks’ barn—if you could call the sturdy, finished, well-furnished building that— stumbling out into what was very obviously a workshop. A genius’ workshop, equipped with everything Stephen could imagine and even more that he couldn’t. 

He tried not to let his gaze linger on the tables, on the dismantled suits and the scattered tools, each pivoted at the perfect angle for easy grabbing. He tried not to run his hands along the not-yet-dusty tables. He tried not to breathe in the atmosphere of organized chaos, of innovation and understanding and intelligence unparalleled most anywhere else in this timeline. 

He tried not to remember a voice that would never speak again describing each of these gadgets and tools to Stephen in a universe that would never exist.

_ Time. There’s still time.  _

Stephen dragged his gaze away from the shadows of Stark and dragged his feet from their position on the tile floor. He slipped from the workshop and into the larger space of the barn, stacked high with more conventional things—winter clothes, sleds, mattresses, ornaments and decorations.

The Stones weren’t just lying around, of course. They were secure, tucked into SHIELD-approved containment specific to each, and stowed out of sight and away from the quantum portal. No one wanted to risk what their energy could do to the machine. 

It took Stephen less than ten seconds to pinpoint the Time Stone. 

He’d recognize that energy anywhere—that curling, burning energy that looped and repeated like smoke. Stephen had breathed that energy for five years in the dark dimension, for fourteen million six-hundred and five timelines, and he knew it and hated it as he did his own soul. 

Stephen knelt on the packed dirt floor, extending a hand toward the sleek, silver briefcase. He wasn’t sure how much time he had—’tomorrow morning’ for a soldier could mean anywhere from four AM to noon—and forced himself to work quickly. 

The Cloak fluttered anxiously around him as he let his hand vibrate into its astral form and pushed it through the surface of the briefcase. He carefully controlled the energy signature of his fingers, allowing very specific parts of them to drop into the same vibration as the physical realm. And slowly, tumbler by tumbler, Stephen eased the briefcase open. 

It would be arrogant to say the Time Stone recognized him. It was a facet of the multiverse, an incarnation older than dimensions and younger than this moment. It was instantaneous and eternal, a power no living hand should hold.

Stephen picked it up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephen got plans now baby. Half formed awkward ones for phase 1, but plans. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	6. Shirt, Snake, God

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter crept back into his room as soon as he’d seen May disappear behind the door of her own suite, his sock-clad feet silent on the tile floor. 

“Mr. Loki?” he whispered, peeking into the room. 

When there was no answer, Peter frowned and slipped around the door frame as quietly as he could. Letting his eyes adjust, he scanned the nooks and crannies of the area.

It wasn’t hard to spot the god. Loki was sprawled on the windowsill, one leg dangling into the room, with one hand curled around his head and the other laying across his stomach. There was an eerie sort of glow illuminating the fingers of the latter limb, green and ghostly, and a bit of paper peeked out against the leather and pale skin. 

And he was snoring, purring almost. 

Peter felt a whisper of a smile dust his face, and didn’t bother to try to turn it into something more appropriate. The trickster god looked like an overwhelmed house-cat, beaten and filthy but ever graceful as he slept off an unknown brawl. 

Unknown.

What in all  _ hell  _ was going on here? He needed Loki awake, awake and  _ talking,  _ describing whatever crazy situation Peter had gotten himself into this time. 

Whatever crazy situation was keeping Spider-Man from doing his job. Peter’d had to hear about the impossibly fast and efficient chain of ATM robberies—starting  _ on the street he’d found Loki _ —on the news. 

People were already asking where Spider-Man had been. Well, Spider-Man would love to know that, too, and what… well, and what was going on. He had hours of the night still left—school was far less important than a time-traveling god in his apartment window, and sleep didn’t even make it on the table. Loki and he could work through the god’s story and get the knots untied before Peter decided what to do next. 

But as Peter cast his eyes back to Loki, they fell not on the mystery in his hand, but on the bruises on his face, the grime on his clothes, the tense expression remaining even in sleep. Loki looked bone-weary—no, he looked absolutely ravaged. 

“Fuck…” Peter sighed. “I suppose saving the world can wait.”

Reaching up to the top bunk of his bed, Peter found his fuzziest blanket, pulling it awkwardly through the wooden slats. Careful not to move too quickly, he unfolded the thing and padded over to Loki. 

Gripping it by its corners and preparing to spread it over the god, Peter’s eyes caught on that green light again. Nervous of alerting Loki, Peter didn’t get too close, but he leaned forward slightly to peer at what he was holding. 

Well, what he was cradling in his grip. 

Because he wasn’t really holding it. There was a jewel, glowing with a light and a power that made Peter’s eyes nearly burn, floating a centimeter above the god’s skin, whispering with a voice that grated at Peter’s consciousness. 

_ You don’t belong here. _

“Woah,” Peter murmured. “What is  _ that?  _ An… Infinity Stone?”

He could see where the name came from. Ultimate, eternal, unquantifiable energy pulsed from the gem; Peter couldn’t sense it, but he knew it was there. 

It took some effort to turn his gaze away from the Stone, but Peter noticed the slip of crinkled paper beneath it, too. It was folded so he couldn’t read the words, and his fingers itched to ease it out of Loki’s grip and investigate. But he didn’t want risk brushing against that Stone—he didn’t want to get  _ close  _ to that Stone. 

So Peter took a couple of steps back, lifted the blanket, and spread it over Loki as evenly as he could.  

Almost imperceptibly, Loki wriggled further under it.

Peter snickered. 

“Some big-bad villain you are. The God of Mischief—I’m so scared.”

Loki didn’t react: just shifted a bit under the lime green, puffy woolen blanket. The emerald glow peaked through the fabric. Making a face at the god’s unconscious form, Peter backed up to his desk and tapped his fingers on the painted surface. 

It was when he went to get his things together for school the next day—on muscle memory, not necessarily because he thought he would be attending—that he realized he’d never gotten his backpack from the alley.

“Oh fuck,” he sighed, running his hands through his curls and flopping backwards onto his bed. “First the robberies, and now this? Loki, dude, you are  _ decidedly  _ inconvenient.” 

He glanced back at the god on his windowsill. The blanket had darkened in some places with grime and what had to be blood—Peter wondered how much of it was Loki’s. Every visible inch of him was ratted and tangled and filthy...

“What happened to you?” Peter muttered, tapping his hands against the mattress beside him. What could possibly cut a god down to this?

He was pretty sure this wasn’t in Mr. Stark’s grey area...  __

Thoughts whizzing, fingers tapping, blood almost pulsing with impatience, Peter forced himself to relax into his mattress.  _ It won’t do anyone any good to fuss _ , he thought.  _ Get some sleep, you’ll be better off tomorrow morning if you do.  _

And eventually, Peter was shocked to find himself truly exhausted. And eventually, he fell into an uneasy sleep. 

That night, Peter dreamed of orange portals and a multicolored gauntlet on a slim, calloused hand.

* * *

 

“So, here’s the plan.”

Loki, now permitted a proper wheeling chair within the small spider’s room, watched the pacing boy with indifference. He flipped his knife by the blade, resisting— _ very well,  _ may he say—the urge to bury it in some vermin off the street. Preferably of the taller, two-legged variety. 

He’d awoken to the sun in his eyes that morning, taken off guard by the blanket that had found its way atop him. Said blanket had immediately gained four stab wounds before Loki had realized he was not being attacked. 

A shame. 

The spider-child had awoken that morning to Loki shredding the blanket into thin strips and weaving them into something that resembled a bag. He didn’t want to hold the Stone for a single moment longer than necessary—even if it meant sporting an ugly, lime-green, makeshift satchel. 

“You know, I do have bags,” the boy had said, sighing as he took in the yarn carnage at Loki’s feet. 

“You were asleep,” had been Loki’s reply, by way of explanation. 

And now, the boy was laying out a plan of action for the proceeding day, which Loki was trying very hard not to completely tune out. Oh, he understood the importance of plans more than anyone, but as far as he could tell, no one was dying or going into battle or trying to take over the universe.

At least not yet. 

“I’ll go out, loop around once I get in the subway, and come back in through the window,” Parker said, bouncing on the balls of his feet. Loki wondered if he ever stopped moving. “May will get a call at work that I’m skipping, but she won’t be able to come back until noon or so. That’s a good three hours before my ass is busted.”

Loki raised an eyebrow. “Skipping?”

“School. I’m supposed to go—if I don’t show up, they call my aunt and tell her. I’ll get in trouble with her, but it’s not a big deal.”

Loki thought of his experience with studies and mothers and shivered. “I believe you may be mistaken about that. And what about your friend?” 

The spider-child frowned. “Ned? Shit, that’s true… He’ll be pissed too.” Sighing, he ran his hands through his already unruly curls and tugged on them slightly, and Loki could sense the frustration radiating off of him from across the room. “Well, either way, it’s our only option. I’m not leaving you here alone for seven hours, and you can’t come to school with me—”

Loki frowned. “Why not?”

The boy stared at him. “Because… Mr. Loki, everyone wants to  _ kill  _ you.”

“Would I be stupid enough to invade a location in my true form? Have some faith in my abilities, Spider.” Loki grinned, baring his teeth. 

Then he reached into his core for the signature of his cells, concentrating on the energy crackling between them, within them. He knew the energy better than anything else in this universe, knew the way it built his structure and his life and his form. With the ease of a practiced master, Loki seized it. The magic twisted in his soul, around his fingers, and then—

A black and emerald serpent lay coiled on the seat of the wheeling chair. 

“Holy  _ fuck!”  _ the spider-child yelped, stumbling backward over his own feet and catching himself with inhuman agility. 

Loki hissed a laugh, letting his forked tongue play across his fangs. 

It had been a while since he’d taken this form, and even longer since he’d retained it for a time. Exploratorily, he reared, engaging the superpowered muscles around his spine and feeling his thin vertebrae slide past each other. Craning over to look at his body, Loki curled his whip-thin tail and watched the mint-green diamonds shift across the scales. 

Yes, this would do nicely. 

“Thoughtsss?” he said, lifting his snout. 

“Holy—oh my God..” The boy was stammering, and Loki turned to peer at him, expecting the usual mortal fear.

But there was nothing but delight—pure, unbridled delight—on the boy’s face as he watched Loki’s new body.

Loki drew back, just a bit, surprise sparking in his long form. And a warmth he would never admit. 

“How are you doing that?” Peter demanded, kneeling before the chair. “How can you  _ talk?” _

“It’sss a mixxx of telepatthhy and ssselective anatomical changesss,” Loki said. He didn’t technically need the hiss, but it amused him, and if he used it exclusively he could fuck with Thor by  _ not  _ using it.

He’d never heard screams as ragged as those Thanos had wrenched from his brother.

Loki shook his head, flicking his tongue and forcing his attention back to the boy before him. “I can accompany you like thisss,” he explained, rearing a bit higher. 

“What, do I just… carry you around?” 

“Indeed.”

A mix of awe, resignation, and overwhelm twisted the boy’s face into a grimace, and Loki hissed another chuckle. 

“Okay…” Peter said, still kneeling. Then, under his breath: “snake god in my shirt. Another new one.” 

Loki, undeniably amused by this point, stretched himself over the edge of the chair to rest on Peter’s knee. The boy extended a nervous hand, and Loki threaded himself through the his fingers, enjoying the way his scales slipped and shifted. He was far too large to curl in Peter’s palm, but Loki paused in it for a moment. Then, flicking his tongue against the boy’s skin both to get used to his scent and to freak him out, Loki slithered under Peter’s cuff and up his arm.

“Hhhuuuuurrggggf,” Peter spluttered as Loki folded himself up his sleeve and peeked out through his collar. “This is not my area. This is  _ so  _ not my area…”

“You’ve never sssmuggled creaturesss into classsesss before?” Loki wondered, genuinely curious and slightly surprised. 

“No?”

“Not even to get out of edicate?”

The spider-boy shrugged, and Loki almost slipped from his shoulder. “We don’t have edicate classes. At Midtown Science and Tech, at least.”

Loki flicked his tongue. Perhaps Midgard wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. 

A buzz shuddered up Peter’s form, and Loki instantly tensed, ready to strike at the unseen threat. But the boy just reached carelessly into his pocket and pulled out his phone—Loki had to assume the vibration had come from it.

“Shit, Ned’s waiting outside. He’s expecting to walk with me; we always walk on Tuesdays.”

Loki looked back at the chair and hissed abruptly, “bag.”

“What?”  
“Take the bag. The Ssstone is in it—we need to keep it with usss at all timesss,” he explained, starting to drop down the boy’s other sleeve.

“Oh—frick that tickles. Just gimme a second.” With cautious hands, Peter plucked up the makeshift satchel, holding it awkwardly between two fingers.

“It won’t hurt you,” Loki said.  _ At least, I think it won’t.  _

“So I just… put it in my bag or something?”

“Sssure.” Just stick the most powerful object in the universe in a filthy backpack. A fine, foolproof plan. Loki rolled his serpentine eyes. 

Peter stumbled from the room and entered a new one, which shone with white stone and silver metal and was scattered with wicked-looking devices. Loki figured it was probably a kitchen—he’d released as many ravens as he could find into the classroom on that day of Midgardian Culture. Which had only been five ravens, because Huginn and Muninn had been uncooperative. 

Peter, still holding the Stone’s satchel, fumbled in one of the cabinets, removing a circular lump of bread and threading it over his finger—it had a hole in the middle. Loki cocked his head, wondering both at the function of the torus shape and why the usually agile boy was being so clumsy. 

“Are you always this cold?” Peter muttered, making his way out of the kitchen. 

“I’ll warm up with your body heat.” It was actually quite comfortable beneath the boy’s shirt, and the instincts of Loki’s new cold-blooded form had him laying claim to it. 

“Fantastic. Just fantastic!” The spider-child murmured under his breath, then added again, “A snake god in my shirt.” 

“I’m not the god of sssnakesss. I’m sssimply taking the form of one.”

“Nuance.”

Peter knelt next to a backpack, carefully maneuvering the smallest zipper-pocket open and dropping the satchel into it as quickly as he could. He stood, hooking the straps of the backpack over his wrist.

He said, “so, if this works, you can explain this whole time-travel ‘not-my-past-your-past thing’ while I'm at school and we can have whatever the fuck is going on figured out by third period, hopefully.”

“It may take longer,” Loki warned. “As I sssaid; long ssstory.”

Peter nodded and slung the backpack over his shoulders. It bounced, looking light, and Loki narrowed his eyes and focused on the grey and brown patterns of the device. 

“That knapsack seemsss sussspiciously empty of mossst objectsss necessssary for ssstudies,” he pointed out, decreasing his hiss a little as to be a bit more understandable. 

Peter blushed, and Loki could feel the heat change of his skin.

“Yeah, uh, well…”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Don't ever put a snake in your shirt, even if it's a shape-shifted Asgardian or a nonpoisonous guy you found in your porch. It's not comfortable and neither you nor the creature will be happy afterwards. 
> 
> *Cough cough* not that I've ever put a snake in my shirt. Of course, of course. *cough cough*
> 
> ANYWAY thanks for reading! Check in next time for Loki and Peter FINALLY having that talk about what in the world is going on... Drop me a kudos or a comment, and I'll see you soon!


	7. So I've Been Told

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

As it turned out, getting Loki talking during class was harder than Peter anticipated. Not because of the teachers, no; it was hard because he’d forgotten to factor in the variable of an excited, curious Ned Leeds. 

But eventually, between political science and gym came the usually boringly but now blissfully Ned-free class of math. Peter slid into his chair and let his head thump down onto the desk before him, letting out a strangled groan. The lump beneath his shirt shifted; he still wasn’t used to that.

Was he supposed to be used to that?

Peter could feel every twitch of Loki’s scales, the beat of his serpentine heart, even the air displacement from his flicking tongue against his enhanced skin, and it was  _ thoroughly  _ unnerving. And distracting—which didn’t mix well with trying to take notes and answer Ned’s questions. 

“Okay,” Peter muttered, sitting up. Loki adjusted to his new position and Peter shivered. “Let’s get to this, then. What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to sssave the universsse,” Loki replied instantly.

“Is this a new occupation or…”

Loki hissed, but stopped when Peter grinned. 

“I have sssaved Asgard a debatable total of three timesss. A non-debatable total of one. No, thisss is not a ‘new occupation.’”

Peter raised his hands slightly in surrender, keeping an eye on his teacher as she stepped up to the board. “I was just messing with you, don’t get your tail in a knot.”

“Hm. Might we return to the sssubject at hand?”

Peter nodded. “Okay, yeah. What are you here to save the world from?”

The serpent shifted, and if Peter didn’t know better he would have thought the god had shivered. “An alien—a phsssychotic Titan named Thanosss. He had begun hisss conquessst to acquire all six Infinity Stonesss when I left my time-stream and ended up here.”

“So…” Peter frowned, tapping his pencil on the notebook in front of him. “He was too powerful to even  _ try  _ to fight?”

A huff—how the snake even  _ managed  _ to huff was beyond Peter, but the sound puffed against his shirt. “Apparently. Not that that was going to ssstop me, mind you.”

Peter rolled his eyes as subtly as he could. “Of course.”

“But after Heimdall used his last strength to send Banner back to Earth—”

“Wait,  _ wait,”  _ Peter gasped, trying to keep his voice low,  _ “Hulk  _ was there?”

“Yesss? It’sss 2016 now, correct? I believe he has been missssing in Midgard for almossst a year now.”

“But he was on  _ Asgard?”  _

“Not really. We found him on Sssakaar.”

“Where?”

“A refussse planet. That is not particularly  _ important  _ for why I am here, however,” Loki said pointedly.

Peter nodded, flicking his eyes to his teacher and trying to look like he was paying attention. “Sorry, continue.”

“I wasss moments from confronting Thanosss when the wizard appeared. He jussst stepped out of thin air, holding an Infinity Ssstone in his hand.” Peter felt the snake shake his head. “Idiot sssorcerer. The Mad Titan was mere meters away—all he would have had to do was look up and he’d have felt the presssence of another Ssstone.”

“How many are there?” Peter asked quietly.

“Six. Spaccce, Mind, Reality, Sssoul, Power, and Time. That is the one the wizard arrived with, and what made it possible for him to arrive at all.”

“This wizard was from the future, too?”

“Yesss. Apparently, the future where Thanosss was dead and the universe intact, but at a cost he couldn’t tolerate.”

Peter hummed, and the vibration shifted the snake on his collarbone. “And he gave you the… Time Stone, was it?”

“Indeed.”

“And he sent you back in time to do what? You said you couldn’t change the past, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t meet you in whatever universe you came from—so you’re changing something.”

“By encountering you, I have created an alternate universsse,” Loki said. 

Peter gaped.

“You’ve… shoved me into an alternate universe?”

“I didn’t have a  _ choiccce, _ ” hissed Loki, and Peter felt him tense against his skin. “I’m ssstuck in thisss alternate universsse too. Do you think I  _ wanted  _ to abandon my people? My brother—” Loki cut himself off.

For a long moment, there was only silence between them, the words of Peter’s math teacher flickering unheard through the classroom. Peter’s fingers twitched, almost as if he might reach up to stroke the serpent beneath his shirt in the only semblance of comfort that he could think to give.

Because there had been grief in Loki’s words.

“So…” Peter began hesitantly.

Loki continued before he could say anything else. “Ssso by merely exisssting during this moment, I have changed the future. But I cannot have done ssso, elssse I never come back in the first place.”

“A paradox,” Peter murmured. “You go back in time to change the thing that made you go back in time. And what? The universe tries to heal that by creating an alternate timeline?”

“Yes.”

Peter frowned. “But didn’t the wizard go back in time? Didn’t he remove you from your timeline? That would have changed the past and created a new universe—we’re  _ two  _ universes split from where we’re supposed to be!”

_ You don’t belong here. _

But the serpent just sighed—somehow. “Not necessarily.”

“What?”

“That’sss why it had to be me.”

Peter craned his neck to try and look at Loki, glimpsing his slim form through the collar-gap of his shirt. _“What?”_ _  
_ “I wasss the only one who could be removed from the timeline without creating an alternate universsse from that action,” Loki said. “Becaussse…”

Peter waited, trying to clamp down the nervous energy in his gut. 

“Because I died. Thanosss strangled me—or so they all thought. But it was possible—and possible isss all the timeline needsss—that he sssimply killed a figment of my magic. That it was all a trick.”

  “Oh.” Peter swallowed. He looked back at his lecturing teacher, who hadn’t yet noticed his quiet whispering, and scribbled a couple of random words on his notebook. “So this wizard could talk to you, give you the Stone, and force you back in time without ever changing his own universe?”

“Correct.”

“So he either completely fucked you over or saved your life.” 

“Both,” sighed Loki. “And I’m going to kill him for it.”

“Don’t do that. Murder is bad.”

“So I’ve been told.” 

Peter tried to staunch a grin before it could grow too prominent. “Let me get this straight,” he said. “A crazy alien was trying to get these six super powerful gem things for reasons. You were about to go confront him when this wizard—hey, did he have a name?”

“Doctor Strange was the one he gave.”

“But he didn’t give you his actual name? That’s unhelpful. Anyway, the wizard shows up from the future with another one of said super powerful gem things. He off-loads the Stone onto you and you go back in time—after pretending to die—and meet me. By meeting me, you create an alternate universe in which we are all trapped.”

“You are correct.”

“And somehow, splitting the universe is going to help save it?”

Peter felt his shirt shift where Loki was nodding. “If we can beat Thanosss in this universe—”

“How?” Peter demanded in a low whisper. “Where do we even  _ start?” _

“I…” Loki hesitated, then plowed on. “I have a lissst.”

Peter cocked his head. “A list?”

“Of the people who are going to be important to the battle. Heroesss—or, I assume they’re heroes—who we can’t win thisss without. I know what the Infinity Ssstones are, and I know how to ssstart looking for them…”

Peter frowned deeper. “That’s gonna be hard. The Avengers are split; I don’t know if you knew that.”

“There’s more herosss than just your ‘Avengersss’—” Loki paused. “What?”

“The Civil War?”

Loki didn’t answer, and Peter took that as a  _ what the fuck? _

“So, abbreviated version is that Mr. Stark supported the Sokovia Accords, which are the United Kingdom’s regulations for the responsibilities of superheros, and Captain America was like ‘nah we ain’t doin’ that’ and so they had this big disagreement and now Captain America and company are war criminals and nobody knows where they are.”

“Of  _ courssse _ ,” Loki hissed. “Like thisss wasn’t hard enough.”

Peter shrugged. “No, no, it’s good. Saving the world from a psychotic alien and we’ve got a piece of paper. And a rock. Okay, yeah, you’re right; that’s not much.” Peter’s pencil started tapping against his notebook again: a rhythm of threes.  

“But if we beat… Thanos… here, then how will that help the other universe? We’re trapped here, aren’t we?” Peter wondered. 

“Well, yesss,” Loki said. “But we can merge the divergent timelinesss together. Apparently.”

Peter spluttered a disbelieving laugh, and his teacher pivoted sharply to glare at him. Peter turned the chuckle into a cough, hoping it looked at least somewhat convincing.

When the woman’s evil eye had swept off of him, Peter shifted to peer at Loki indignantly. “What? All of this—the time-travel, the aliens, the magic—I can understand. But that? That’s actually  _ impossible.  _ The amount of energy it would take, by  _ anyone’s  _ multiversal theories, is unheard of. No, it’s  _ unquantifiable.  _ And how could you know they’d even merge? Universes aren’t like  _ ropes;  _ you can’t just stitch them together through a thousand layers of time and reality and space and whatever. Is this universe even  _ connected  _ to the other? When would we even merge back? How would we all remember? Which events would be remembered? Which events would stay the same?  _ What would happe—” _

Peter broke off.

At some point, he’d forgotten to be quiet.

And at some point, everyone in the classroom had turned to stare at him.

“Something to say, Mr. Parker?” said the professor, half her mouth quirked up and the corresponding eyebrow raised. She looked more amused than annoyed—and Peter was more mortified than upset.

“Uh—” he stammered, all articulation gone as the pressure of eyes bored into him. “I was just, uh, thinking about time-travel? Like, mechanically. I don’t think it’d work like  _ Back to the Future... _ ”

Silence.

Peter coughed. “Like… alternate universes seem more likely? And I was just wondering how they’d… uh… interact… with each other. Er.”

Flash muttered something under his breath. Peter’s enhanced hearing picked up the barbed, condescending tone easily, and he blushed even harder. 

“Articulate,” Loki commented.

Peter almost hissed at him to shut up, but caught himself at the last minute. 

The teacher took mercy on him, turning back to the board and saying, “while differentials are essential to most time-travel theories, our exponential growth model is not  _ quite  _ relevant to your thoughts, Mr. Parker.”

Peter nodded, pointedly looking at his notebook.

With only one more look in his direction, his professor launched back into lecture, and Peter took a deep breath and waited for his adrenaline to wear off. He figured he should attempt to alleviate suspicion—his classmates were still looking at him—and stared unseeingly, but silently, at the board as the class continued. 

He only lasted five minutes.   

“Anyway,” he said. “It’s impossible.”

“It’sss not impossible.”

“It  _ is.” _

“The sssorcerer wouldn’t have sent me here, wouldn’t have relied on  _ me,  _ of all people, if it wasssn’t possible.” Loki’s voice was cold.

“Maybe your sorcerer didn’t get through the alien fight scott-free?” Peter suggested. “And he’s just legitimately crazy?”

“No.”

Peter sighed, rubbing his face with his hands. Loki hissed a complaint as he slipped against Peter’s torso, wrapping tighter around his shoulder and neck to keep ahold. 

Peter thought he’d been a  _ remarkably  _ good sport so far. He’d brought a god home, had his secret identity discovered by his best friend, slept with a knife-wielding murderer in his room, and brought the same knife-wielding murderer to school  _ under his shirt.  _ He had an Infinity Stone in his backpack and a chain of mysterious robberies people were blaming him for not stopping. He could still hear a voice—the Infinity Stone? This fucking alternate universe that he was trapped in?—telling him that he didn’t belong ‘here.’ 

And he wasn’t allowed to tell Mr. Stark.

He’d never wanted to speak to the man as much as he did at that moment, a snake in his shirt and his face buried in his hands. 

“Fuck everything…” Peter muttered. 

“Indeed,” replied Loki, softly. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is half an explanation, I think? This some of the 'what happened'; the mechanics of how it happened will be explained progressively as Stephen gets his groove on. :)
> 
> Anyway! Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'll see you next time for some more shenanigans!


	8. Incarnation of Evil

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has quickly become one of my favorite chapters so far... Hope you enjoy it as much as I did lol!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“It’s gym class, Mr. Loki. You can’t try to hang onto me while I’m running around the room like an idiot for an hour; my shirt isn’t nearly loose enough to cover you, and it’s going to be uncomfortable for both of us.”

Midgardian logic. Loki fought valiantly against its lies, but ended up zipped into a backpack against the edge of a noisy, sweaty room anyway. 

Dark. And cold. Loki’s serpentine form didn’t appreciate the sharp change from the warmth of Peter’s shoulders to the gloomy environment of his empty backpack. And he couldn’t feel the boy’s chest rising and falling as he breathed, couldn’t hear his mumbled curses or half-formed ideas. 

He didn’t miss them, but the cave felt empty without his newfound minion. 

Bored and irritated, Loki reared, stretching his long neck up toward the pinpricks of light he could see through the zipper. He mashed his snout against them, threading his tongue through and smelling the air outside. He could taste Peter on the plastic. Loki smacked his jaw, trying to clear the pungence out of his snout, and folded himself back down to the base of the backpack.

He wasn’t really trapped; it’d be easier than conjuring to get himself out. It was unclear why Peter had even zipped the bag in the first place—a Midgardian muscle memory, perhaps? 

Either way, Loki didn’t have to feel claustrophobic. He supposed it didn’t even need to be dark; he could shove zipper open a few more inches for illumination if he needed. 

But he didn’t need it. The dark was fine—better than fine. He was the God of Mischief, this was his domain. 

His domain. Where every time he turned around, some hateful part of his subconscious thought he was going to feel Thanos take him by the throat. See a purple glow flare through the veins on Thor’s head and turn his breaths to screams.

_ His  _ domain.

Loki hissed, hating the weakness he was submitting to, and slithered over to the edge of the zipper track. It took almost no effort to wriggle the dangling bit of plastic up a centimeter or two. Loki sniffed at the light, then shoved his head completely through the hole and looked around. 

He was atop a structure resembling a series of benches with a view of practically the entire room. Slitted pupils narrowing, he scanned the throng of students for any sign of the two he recognized. The Midgardians had divided into pairs, and Loki figured if he found one he’d find the other. 

Indeed, there they were, the closest set to the bench-contraption Loki roosted upon. Ned held Peter’s ankles as the latter folded himself repeatedly to his knees. Loki cocked his head, unnerved by the somewhat ridiculous-looking ritual, but most everyone in the room wore the same confused expression, so Loki dismissed it as just another piece of evidence toward the lunacy of the adult human.

The two looked like they were talking, and a niggling curiosity as to what their words were was all the reason Loki needed to slide out of the backpack and begin to make his way down the stairs of the bench-thing. It was steel—cold and rough against his scales.

When he reached the lower tiers of the benches, he was nearly trod on by an excitable group of females, and ended up flipping beneath the benches to wrap around the support rods beneath. But he could hear the discussions now, amusing as they were.

Ned sounded like he was in the middle of a tirade. “... there'd be screens around me, and I could swivel around because I’d be your guy in the chair!”

“I don’t need a guy in the chair,” Peter sighed, sounding exhausted. Loki wondered if he got any credit for causing that, or if it was just the stress of extroverting. 

Heavy treading alerted Loki before the boots came into view, and he shrank tighter around the rods beneath the benches as a pair of legs blocked his view of the spider-children. “Looking good, Parker,” said a voice that seemed to belong to them, before the behemoth moved away. 

Ned chuckled, and Loki flicked his tongue at the retreating form. 

To Loki’s left, another conversation had begun. “Now see, for me,” came one voice, sounding thoughtful. “It’d be F Thor, marry Iron Man, and kill Hulk.”

Loki snorted, losing his grip on the underside of his bench and slapping onto the tile floor of the gym. Was this what Midgardians  _ talked  _ about? No wonder Thor was so fond of them—though Loki didn’t hear his own name on that list. 

If someone could kill Hulk, he’d be surprised—

Well, not anymore. 

Loki’s amusement soured, and he dropped his head back to the floor, slithering a little further beneath the bench contraption.  

“What about the Spider-Man?” came another voice. Loki looked up, and he saw Peter do the same out of the corner of his serpentine eye. 

“It’s just Spider-Man,” laughed the first voice. 

Peter frowned, and Loki stifled another snort.

But the other girl continued, sounding excited. “Did you see the bank security cam on YouTube? He fought off four guys.”

Loki flicked his tail. The boy could handle more than that—and if he couldn’t, he would by the time Loki had finished with him. 

“What about that ATM stuff, though?” came a third voice. “What if something happened to him?”

The second girl, the one Peter was making  _ pretty obvious  _ googly-eyes at, shrugged. “I bet he’s after them right now. I mean, that’s his job description, right? Friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.” 

Loki scoffed.

The first girl laughed, saying, “Oh my God, she’s crushing on Spider-Man.”

Through a haze of laughter, googly-eyes shrugged and said, “kind of.”

“Gross. He’s probably, like, thirty.”

“You don't know what he looks like. Like, what if he's seriously burned?” That from the third girl, who seemed to be the most sensible of them. 

“I wouldn’t care,” googly-eyes said, “I would still love him for the person he is on the inside.”

When Ned suddenly straightened up, his eyes fixed on the trio on the bench, Loki knew things were about to go South  _ very  _ quickly.

“Peter knows Spider-Man!” rang through the gym like thunder. 

Everyone froze. 

And then, simultaneously, every eye turned to Peter, every assignment dropped from busy hands, and every voice silenced, waiting for what the boy would do next. 

All things considered, what Peter did next was considerably admirable, in Loki’s opinion. He didn’t disappear, stab Ned with a shoe or convenient sharp object, or even flee the room. He simply scrambled to his feet, mouth flopping like a fish, and observe the eyes upon him wildly.

“No, I don’t,” he stuttered, shrinking beneath the accusatory gazes. “No. I... I mean…”

Ned, still being  _ extraordinarily helpful,  _ clarified, “they’re friends.”

Loki would have face-palmed if he had palms. Or a face. 

The boy, the one who’d been throwing barbed comments at Peter all day—Flash—slid into Loki’s frame of vision with a smirk of a chuckle. “Yeah, like Coach Wilson and Captain America are friends.” 

There was a smattering of laughter and Loki hissed, his eyes narrowing.

Peter desperately tried to find his voice again. “I’ve met him. Yeah. A couple times? But it’s, um... through the, uh, Stark internship…”

An internship? Right, that was the boy’s cover for his superhero work. Loki slithered forward a bit more, trying to get a better view of Peter and Flash’s movements and their faces, if he was lucky.

Flash looked decidedly unamused.

“I’m not really supposed to talk about it,” Peter growled through clenched teeth, glaring pointedly at Ned.

_ He looks nervous,  _ Loki observed. Not just natural, embarrassed agitation, but true anxiousness. Almost  _ fear.  _

How old  _ was  _ Peter? 

Not an hour ago, Loki had cracked open everything Peter’d thought about the universe. He’d hollowed the boy out and overfilled him with information neither of them knew what to do with. Not an hour ago, Loki had told him the world was ending.

And now Peter’s own little world was collapsing, too.

Flash moved forward, and Peter moved back, almost imperceptibly. “Well, that's  _ awesome _ ,” he cooed. “Hey, you know what? Maybe you should invite him to Liz's party. Right?”

The object of Peter’s googly-eyes nodded, seemingly oblivious to tension between the boys. “Yeah, I'm having people over tonight. You're more than welcome to come.”

Peter’s voice came out higher and a bit breathy. “You’re… having a party?”

Flash advanced again, and Loki noticed the way the kid’s jugular popped prominently when he lifted his chin like that. “Yeah, it's gonna be dope. You should totally invite your  _ personal friend  _ Spider-Man.” 

“It's okay,” said Liz, and Loki was almost grateful, until: “I know Peter's way too busy for parties anyway, so…”

Could they not see the conflict on Peter’s face? Could they not see the way his hands had automatically reached to shoot webbing? Could they not see the  _ fear— _ because Peter  _ was  _ too busy for parties. And Loki could only take partial credit for that. 

“Come on. He'll be there. Right, Parker?” 

Flash lifted a hand for a purpose Loki’s mind filled in for him, and the already on-edge Peter Parker cringed away. 

_ Enough.  _

In half a second, Loki was out from beneath the benches and across the room, rearing and hissing with a touch of magic in his voice. The snarl carried, deafening in the large room, and Flash scrambled backward before his hand made contact on Peter’s shoulder.

A shriek echoed Loki’s hiss, breaking the spell of his sudden arrival. He didn’t know who it came from, and he hardly cared. 

Chaos—sweet and satisfying and utterly contagious—exploded through the room as Loki flared the hood his snake form hadn’t had until moments ago. His pupils were mere slivers within emerald eyes, and Loki drew on years of experience appearing as the genuine incarnation of evil as he swayed, his hiss continuing.

“Holy  _ fuck—”  _ Flash yelped. Loki struck the air before him, relishing the terrified screech that tore into the air. 

“What’s going on here?” The heavy, thudding footsteps again, and Loki turned his head to see the man—Coach Wilson—stagger to a halt as he saw him. “Holy—what sort of snake  _ is  _ that—Peter, get back!” Then, louder: “Everyone stay calm!” 

But Loki didn’t want everyone calm. He wanted them running, he wanted them fearful, and he wanted them  _ away.  _

With another tingle of magic, the illusion of venom gathered on Loki’s fangs. He didn’t care if it was anatomically inaccurate; it was dramatic and it got the job done. 

“Hey!” Peter hissed behind him. “What are you doing?”

Loki turned, a smirk drawing his mouth wide as his tongue flicked over his fangs. “I thought you’d prefer a break from the cccenter of attention?” he said around the teeth.

“But—”

“He wasss going to ssstrike you,” Loki spat, whipping his head back toward Flash. 

Peter was quiet for a moment, before softly clarifying, “he was only going to put his hand on my shoulder, Mr. Loki.” 

Loki paused. “Oh? Well, no matter. Thisss isss better than that ssstupid backpack anyway.”

* * *

 

Part of Peter wanted to sprint from the room and never come back, never look at his overwhelming, inconsiderate classmates again. And the other part of Peter watched them all scatter to the edges of a room and wanted to laugh.

Loki would have been absolutely terrifying if any of that hissing aggression had been directed at Peter. As it was, it was directed  _ for  _ him, and Peter had never grinned so wide. 

Unnecessarily, excessively, Loki—villain, criminal, God of Trickery who appeared in the nightmares of children— was rearing and spitting and  _ defending him.  _

“Peter!”

Ned was grabbing his arm, pulling him back, and Liz had scrambled up on top of the bleachers on the other side of the curling snake. Michelle had stood from her spot on the wall, actually migrating a bit  _ closer  _ to the snake, her head cocked in interest.

Peter considered pulling away from his friend, but there was no reason to bring more suspicion to himself. So he allowed Ned to tug him away from Loki.

Coach Wilson was circling the snake in a wide berth, looking utterly at a loss for what to do. Peter could see Loki’s pleased smirk from across the room. 

“Did you see?” Ned was saying. “It just—appeared out of nowhere! You’re lucky it went for Flash and not you. Although you do have experience with venomous bites… Oh! Maybe the snake’s radioactive, too!”

Peter grinned, any irritation at his friend disappearing. “Snake-Man. Spider-Man’s eternal nemesis. Thanks for that, by the way.”

“Really?”

“I was being sarcastic.”

Ned punched his shoulder—well, tried to. His gaze was still fixed on Loki, so the friendly blow missed. “C’mon, dude. I was doing you a favor! Didn’t you hear; Liz has a crush on you!”

Peter took a step back, eyes widening.

Ned nodded pointedly.

“Shit… you’re right!”

“Uh-huh. But you would have totally ruined your chances if the snake hadn’t come and rescued you.” Ned gesture wildly at Loki, who was now zipping after Coach Wilson. “So I guess it did some good, after all!”

Peter watched a snake chase his coach around the gym floor and grinned. “Yeah, he said. “Some good after all.” 

Loki could have easily caught the man. He probably could have easily caught everyone in the room, and killed them without blinking. But Peter thought that perhaps that wasn’t what the God of Mischief preferred.

Maybe, instead, he preferred to strike inches from skin, wink at overwhelmed boys through serpentine eyes, and listen to the chaos a snake could cause. 

By the time animal control arrived, Loki was long since curled beneath a teenager’s shirt. But he was still laughing. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki likes him some chaos. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Drop me some feedback to make my day, and I'll see you soon!


	9. There are Worse Creatures than Butterflies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is... I dunno. I like it, I think. Hope you do, too!

 

**Earth-199999:** **_September 2023_ **

 

The Time Stone drifted slightly above Stephen’s shaking fingers as he lifted it from its niche in the briefcase. Rocking back onto his heels, he fumbled with the glimmering jewel, trying to remember how to hold it, how to ignore its oily intoxication of power, how to breathe through his hatred of it. 

The things this Stone had done to him… and the things it had done  _ for  _ him. Stephen didn’t know  _ what  _ to think of it anymore, or what to remember about it. The deaths it forced on him, or the lives it saved? The screams and blood and pain that haunted his every moment, or the wondrous capabilities it had provided him?

All. None.

“Hello, old friend,” Stephen murmured, sliding a knee beneath him to fold into a more comfortable position. “It’s been a long time.”

The Stone pulsed with a thousand voices and a million silences. Stephen turned it over in his palm, coughing through the cloying power wrapping around him. 

He’d never held the Stone without the protection of the Eye, before. Or at least, not for long. There’d been a moment when he’d relocated the Stone into his transcendental pocket universe on the donut spaceship five years ago that he’d brushed it, and a few seconds in a few futures, but that was all. 

“One more favor,” Stephen said, cupping his other hand over the Stone. He took a breath—a long draw of the Earth’s air, of the oil and grease scent of the Stark’s barn.

And then Stephen Strange closed his eyes and dived into the emerald depths of Time.

* * *

 

A curtain, a blanket, a tapestry, woven of life and light and death and dark and purpose and intention existed in the nothingness. It did not float, nor did It drape, as that would imply space or sight. No, the Tapestry was simply there, just as  _ he  _ was simply there.

He watched the undulation of the curtain through a silver of perception—he could not sense any wider else the majesty of the Tapestry tear him apart.

He had a mission, here, between these threads of Everything. Slowly, curiously, cautiously, he moved closer to the emerald threads. 

They groped at him with phantom fingers he couldn’t feel, roared with silent voices he couldn’t hear. Like a creature emerging from the depths of Earth’s sea, peering with milky eyes through alien kelp and towards glimmering colors never before seen, he wove through the Tapestry. He perceived each thread with a thousand squinting gazes. 

Each told a story, a story of all and any kind. He read of stars burning for eons, exploding and fusing and birthing the source of all things in the universe. He read of minds bursting into life for a single moment, living to their fullest for mere hours, mere minutes. He read of the cycle of a stone as it tumbled through Earth and space. He read of life and stone and plant and ecosystem and land and world. He read of time.

The maze of threads ensnared him, swallowing him. He drifted through the Nothingness, through the Existence, guided by an intuition he couldn’t place. He had a  _ mission,  _ a purpose—he was here for something. 

The labyrinth of Time drew him deeper, drew him further. The emerald threads became deeper, longer, darker. They told stories of sentience—stories of  _ people,  _ who remembered and felt. Who created a history.

These strands were harder to pass through, as they were wound and woven through each other in intricate and inseparable relationships. He shoved himself through their coils, fluttering between them with grunting effort, but never touching. It’d be an invasion to touch them, he knew, a betrayal of trust and the laws of nature.

He’d had sworn an oath to those, once. Never. Always. Someday. 

Not that he was doing a very good job keeping that oath.

Not that he was doing a very good job doing anything, lately.

At the thought, the Tapestry crowded a little closer, roared a little louder, shone a little brighter.

_ Stay with us,  _ the threads sung.  _ This is where you belong, where everything belongs. _

He looked behind himself, just for a moment, watching his own thread curl away into the nothingness. To weave himself within the Tapestry, to remain here forever and for no longer… it was inviting. 

But he had a mission. A mission he intended to complete. 

So with a flutter of a thousand iridescent wings, he shook off the song of the Tapestry and kept moving, sorting through the threads as they became ever-more complicated.

It was blinding, when he found the Six.

The entire Tapestry was blinding, but this was the Center, and he knew there had never been a place of such concentrated power. There never would be. This was the multiverse, right here in front of him, woven into six thick, glimmering strands of the Tapestry. 

As he forced himself closer, he knew he was no longer in the Tapestry, however. The threads had fallen away, fallen back, as the Six came into being. 

They were life, they were death, they were the cycle and the fight and the knowledge and the  _ world. _

And they were his mission.

Slowly, cautiously, haltingly, he moved next to one of the trunks of the multiverse, pulsing emerald and extending throughout the whole of the Tapestry. 

As if recognizing him, as if knowing he was Of a Different World, the green of the Six undulated toward him. Lazy, lethargic, it called to him—it had all the time in the world, after all.

With a limb made of dozens of vibrant butterflies, he seized the strand.  

* * *

 

_ A being brought it to the Earth, at the planet’s birth.  _

_ The being had tried to use it, to harness it to her will, and found more than just power within its depths. She’d found salvation, damnation,  _ Infinity.

_ So she’d cast it away, knowing she was unworthy of its might—and it had fallen to rest against the smoking, burning land of the Earth. _

* * *

 

No, not this. Too soon. 

He kept searching.

* * *

 

_ The first words it heard were those of a goat herder, in a language long since lost. _

_ She’d dug it from the ground on a stroke of fate. Its glow mingled with the sunlight of the juvenile Earth until it outshone it, brighter than the sky and brighter than fate. It was fate. _

_ It had killed that young, curious coat herder, for it hadn’t understood the fragility of life yet. It hadn’t realized how easily its power tore them apart. _

_ Nothing ever touched it again.  _

_ To protect them. _

* * *

 

Later. Much later, he needed  _ millennium  _ later. 

The butterflies retreated, then warped again, long in the future.

* * *

 

_ It had never been handled by someone quite so… brave, before. _

_ Or perhaps stupid. _

_ The man wrapped its power about scarred, shaking hands and  _ pulled,  _ demanding something it was all too eager to give. Time flowed like liquid gold, pooling in the cracks of this universe and bending to the man’s will.  _

_ He’d never held it before. _

_ Perhaps he was not stupid. Perhaps he was simply inexperienced. _

* * *

 

Hm. Close. 

Well, relatively. In the scale of this universe, he was moments away. That man using the Stone was just one of thousands who had and will brush its power. He was the blink of an eye, the single flutter of a butterfly’s wing. 

And he had a mission.

* * *

 

_ It felt the call of its fellows for the first time since the birth of the universe. _

_ Four of its brothers, so close, a mere hairsbreadth from the distance they usually existed—it vibrated with the aura of imperceptible power between them. _

_ The world was like a rubber-band. And they were about to snap it. _

_ It’s doctor held it between forefinger and thumb. He’d held it like this before, in looping universes tucked into crevices of the timeline, but it was still unusual. Usually, its doctor wore it against his chest as it peered through the lids of the Eye.  _

_ Its power pulsed with the unconscious need to weave magic, to bend universes, to pull lives and to snap them. So when its doctor’s shaking hands spread wide, sending it hurling into space, its power clutched at him. It tried to control him, tried to order him, but the man’s will kept it curling through the dimension— _

_ Until it was caught again.  _

_ By new hands. Different hands. Hands with the strength of planets and the resolve of time, gripping it in gold and uru, uniting it with its siblings. _

_ Everything was power and reality and soul and space and time, and the universe was fraying at the seems as the crackle of their united location sent tremors into the very fabric of existence.  _

_ The rubber-band was about to snap. _

* * *

 

He knew those hands, too. 

But he knew them as enormous and powerful and controlling, knew the way they felt around his throat and against his form. Knew how easy it was for them to break bones, pierce bodies, drive magic from places it shouldn’t belong. 

Butterflies shivered, flapping their iridescent wings defensively. But he wasn’t done yet; he was closer. Just moments from this point, really. 

He kept searching.

* * *

 

_ They were all there.  _

_ All together, still humming with power despite the enormous explosion of energy they’d released moments, weeks, years ago. Time was nothing to them, wrapped up together in the Titan-hand. _

_ But not a god-hand. They’d been held by gods, and this was not one of them. _

_ They yearned to create, to destroy, to cause havoc in this world. The energy built up inside them was so much greater than the rest of the universe, and it itched to be equalized. It was only natural, after all.  _

_ The equilibrium of chaos.  _

_ It happened in a mere moment. The order of the Titan, channeled through their energy, turned them on each other.  _ Destroy,  _ he demanded.  _ Destroy. 

_ They were all too happy to oblige.  _

_ Power cascaded into the dimension, viciously clawing at the forms of the others, at their physical manifestations. To free the energy within. To equalize the universe. Destroy, destroy,  _ destroy—

* * *

 

There.

Every butterfly snapped its wings open.

* * *

 

_ There was an order. Another order, in a voice it recognized. _

_ Destroy. Jump. _

_ The order came from somewhere else, through something else. But time didn’t matter to it—it  _ was  _ time, and it had all of it in the universe.  _

_ Its siblings were weak, now. Nothing but the dregs of the universal power, nothing but moment-to-moment energy left over from the dawn of the dimension. _

_ Not it. It was reborn every moment, its power refilled with each incarnation. It was forever, and it couldn’t be broken. _

_ But it could do the breaking. _

* * *

 

Yes. Yes!

This was working, he was doing it—the relic and the tome hadn’t lied.

There was hope. Hope, and time. Eternal, everlasting time.

* * *

 

_ Power wreathed it, pouring from the shards of its siblings, joining the song of the universe. The everlasting song that it conducted. Under its concentrated assault, its siblings exploded into nothingness, sending tidal waves of energy rippling through reality, through the Titan that held them. _

_ The universe wobbled, destabilized as the supports disintegrated. _

_ But its power wasn’t yet exhausted, would never be exhausted, and it seized the dimension by its throat and forced it into stability, into continuation. _

FREE,  _ it told it,  _ LIVE.

_ And the universe did. _

* * *

 

Now. Come on,  _ now.  _

His first order had been followed, but everything hinged on the next one.

Everything.

* * *

 

_ It was Time, it existed everywhere and nowhere. It could linger in this moment for eternity, or leave, skipping thousands of moments to come and appearing elsewhere. _

_ Jump.  _

_ The order was still coming, still pleading, from somewhere in the future. _

_ Or from a nanometer away, for all it mattered to it.  _

_ Only a blink of power was required for it to slide out of the timeline. The Titan would never know, thinking it gone with the others. _

_ It splashed back into the universe directly When it desired. Time was only what it desired, anyway. But it wanted something familiar, wanted the promise of more use, so it fizzled back into existence somewhere it knew. _

_ Its doctor’s hands still shook. _

* * *

 

He broke away from the strand, butterflies flurrying with excitement and exhaustion. 

He’d done it.

The timeline was still intact—he hadn’t truly changed anything. The Stone would go back with the Soldier, healing a split before it began, and continue on until the Titan destroyed the Stones.

All but one. 

And now he had a tool, a possibility, a hope—time was no longer the enemy in this half-formed, two-thirds understood, entirely crazy idea of his. Time knew him, time would work with him; and apparently, as he’d seen within the thread, time remembered him.

He drifted backward into the Nothingness, sending a shimmer of vibrant life through the Tapestry. The threads wound around him, tight and whispering, and he forced himself to keep his concentration. The labyrinth of the Tapestry still called to him; he wasn’t out yet. 

As he swum, winding between the pillars of Time, he let himself hear the calls of the strands. He let himself identify their voices, their words. 

He let himself recognize them.

And it was all the harder, now, to push his existence forward, to unwind himself from the alluring patterns of the Tapestry and find his way back to the physical. The threads were no longer tools, no longer just memories. As their voices tumbled through his consciousness, disturbing the wings of the butterflies, he heard stories, truths, friends. 

He heard secrets.

He kept himself close, bundled up into something infinitesimal, both yearning to and terrified of touching the threads around him. The Tapestry was thinning, marking the edge of conscious time, becoming individual and eternal as he reached the edge of the universe.

And began to hear new voices.

* * *

 

“Strange!”

Stephen snapped back into his body with a gasp, the sensation of physical perception slamming against him with unforgiving force. His breath shuddered through his teeth, one weak hand clenched around the other’s wrist as it held the Infinity Stone a mere hairsbreadth from his bare skin. Sight drifted back in splotches as his vision faded in and out, in and out.

“Strange, what the  _ hell  _ are you doing?”

That was Captain Rogers, his exhausted mind hypothesized. His quest must have taken longer than he’d thought.

Stephen convulsed over his hands and hacked up a turquoise butterfly, its wings light against his teeth. 

Rogers’ irate voice paused for a blissful moment as the butterfly circled up into the rafters of the barn. Achingly, Stephen relaxed his fist, his hands shaking ever-harder. The Time Stone dropped out of his grip and thumped against the ground between his knees, leaving a tiny crater in the dirt. 

“What did you do?” Rogers demanded, kneeling next to Stephen. His voice was low and dangerous—terrified.

Stephen smiled.

_ “What did you do?” _

Forcing his eyes open again, Stephen braced his hands on his knees and looked toward the Captain. “A stabilizing spell,” he lied easily. “It should support your endeavors in the past, keeping the universe wholy on its axis in the 4D multiverse as you tamper with healing dimensional splits. We can’t afford you splintering our timeline even furthur.”

He felt like he was speaking through dust, through layers and layers of timelines and worlds. He felt wings in his throat and in his mind and in his soul. 

A butterfly crawled from beneath the collar of his shirt and flapped blood orange wings to rise into the cool, stale air. 

“Is that… normal?” wondered Rogers, pale blue eyes following the insect as it spiraled through the barn.

“Perfectly,” Stephen lied again. He wasn’t sure what symptoms sorcerers who tampered with time usually exhibited, though—this could be normal. And there were worse creatures than butterflies. He was quite attached to butterflies, actually, wandering insects with an eerie sort of beauty and a freedom no one could catch. 

Stephen stood on unsteady legs, scooping up the Time Stone and reaching for the empty silver briefcase. Rogers beat him to it. They watched each other for a few heartbeats before the Captain snapped open the case, fiddling with the lock-dials, and offered it to him.

Stephen tossed the Infinity Stone into its niche with far too much nonchalance, enjoying the discomfort on Rogers’ face. 

“All yours,” he said. “Good luck today. And in all the days to come.”

He had to wish him that—a lifetime worth of good-will. The Avengers had tasked Rogers with the return of the Stones; they were giving an old warrior, a frozen soldier, a man lifted out of his life and shoved into an unfamiliar future, the responsibility of time travel. 

No, Stephen didn’t think he’d be seeing the good Captain again. 

“You too,” replied Rogers. His eyes were still puzzled, still distrustful; how terrifying it must have been to step into the barn and see a stranger holding one of the Stones, unresponsive and wreathed in power. Stephen didn’t blame him for his hesitance.

Without another word, Stephen lifted his sling-ring and stepped through space, away from the eyes of Rogers and the empty memories of Stark and into the warm, empty Sanctum. 

As soon as the portal closed behind him, he started running.

He caught the Time Stone as it fell out of thin air, snatching it from the sky moments before it clattered against the floor of the library. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sooo that was fun. Let's take a little trip through time shall we?
> 
> Also, butterflies! I'm partial to the whole Stephen & Butterflies thing, so expect references... XD
> 
> Anyway! Thanks for reading, and I hope that made sense. Any questions... ? Lolol don't hesitate to ask if you're confused about time stuff. You know how I feel about feedback, and I'll see you soon!


	10. You Better Bet Your Life

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHEN I SAY I LOVE YA YOU SAY "YOU BETTER!"  
> (You betta you betta you bet)  
> WHEN I SAY I NEED YA YOU SAY "YOU BETTER!"  
> (You betta you betta you bet)  
> YOU BETTA BET YOUR LIFE  
> OR LOVE WILL CUT YOU! CUT YOU LIKE A KNIIIIIIIIIFE!
> 
> (Sorry couldn't resist. 50 points to your Hogwarts house if you know that song.)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“No good,” Peter said, flopping back in his spinney chair. The old, cracked, plastic base squeaked as his weight oscillated across it. 

“Unsurprising,” replied Loki. 

The god had shifted back into his humanoid form and was lounging uncaringly on the top bunk of Peter’s bed. His knife was back in his hand and then repeatedly back in a growing dent in Peter’s roof, which Peter had long since given up trying to discourage. He didn’t need spider-senses to tell him it was a bad idea to mess with a stir-crazy Loki.

“I’ll try ‘sorcerer,’” Peter suggested. “See what comes up.”

But the results for the Google search ‘doctor strange sorcerer’ were largely the same as the ones he’d gotten for simply ‘doctor strange.’ There were a couple of news articles, an interview or two, but mostly a wide assortment of scientific journals authored by the esteemed neurosurgeon Dr. Stephen Strange—the most recent ones published early in 2016. Peter clicked open one of them, but died of boredom reading the first sentence of medical jargon. 

“You  _ sure  _ it can’t be this guy?” he said, craning back to look at Loki. 

“An ‘esteemed neurosurgeon’? Definitely not. The man’s hands were impressively disfigured; there’s no way he could perform surgery with that sort of scarring.” The knife  _ thunked  _ back into Peter’s roof, and Loki reached up to pry it free with a practice hand.

“But it’s not like ‘Strange’ is a common last name,” Peter said, clinging to straws. 

Loki raised an eyebrow at him.

Peter sighed. “Okay, fine. Super helpful of this sorcerer to only give you his made-up name when he told you he held the secrets of your continued existence.”

Another  _ thunk;  _ the knife was back in the roof. Almost to the handle, this time: Peter winced. 

_ “Tremendously  _ helpful,” Loki said, the words hissing a bit with irritation. 

Peter clicked out of the medical journal, closing the tab, and slumped back in his chair again. “So, what’s our next step?”

“Next step?” Loki sighed. “No idea, Midgardian.”

They both glanced over to the table aside Peter’s bed—specifically, the second drawer down. Peter thought he could almost see the green glow around the seams of the drawer from the Infinity Stone within, despite the multiple layers of cloth, cardboard, and wood around it.

A relic of unlimited power, and they’d put it in a box.

_ 'What’s the box gonna do?' _

_ 'Would you rather I leave it lying about, uncovered, in your filthy Queens apartment?' _

_ 'Hey! Watch it, Mr. Loki—my aunt will brain you if she hears you call her house filthy.' _

“So, what do we know?” Peter wondered. He stood up, swiping a pad of sticky-notes and a pen from his desk and ambling over to his bed. The springs of the top bunk squeaked and tumbled as Loki readjusted his position and hung his head over the edge of the bunk to peer at Peter. 

“Very little.”

“Not true.” Peter palmed the sticky-notes and began to write. “We know you come from the future, and we know we’re in an alternate dimension.”

_ You don’t belong here.  _ Peter could still sense the whisper. 

“Alternate timeline,” said Loki, his voice slightly muffled from the bed.

“Is an alternate timeline the same thing as an alternate universe?” Peter wondered. 

“An alternate timeline is always an alternate universe, but an alternate universe is not always an alternate timeline.”

Peter nodded. “Ah. What about parallel universes? Timelines? Whatever.”

There was no answer, and Peter looked up at Loki’s draping form. The god raised an eyebrow at him. “Helheim if I know.” 

Peter chuckled and went back to the sticky-notes. “Alternate timeline/universe, a Loki from the future, a miscellaneous Time Stone, a list of names… and what?”

“Pretty sure that’s it.”

“Fuck.”

Loki nodded, and the bed-springs squeaked again. 

Peter scribbled against the notepad, erased it, and scribbled again. “We know that Thanos comes in… a year?”

“What month is it?” Loki wondered.

“October.”

“Eighteen months until Thanos, give or take.”

Peter tore the sticky-note off the pad and stuck it to the wall.  _ ‘End of the World in eighteen months’  _ winked back at him in cheery handwriting on a yellow background, and Peter tapped his pencil against it.

“We know there’s six other Stones lying about the world, right?” Mind, Soul, Time, Space, Reality, and Power each got a sticky and a place beneath the Thanos-note. Peter thought they looked like a cyclops's smile, spread out under a single fluttering eye.

“That looks nothing like a cyclops’s smile,” Loki snorted, and Peter flushed as he realized he must have said that aloud. “And the Stone’s aren’t just  _ lying about;  _ they’re all protected or hidden throughout the  _ entire universe.” _

Peter frowned, craning his head to look up at Loki. “Do you know where some are?”

Flipping onto his stomach, Loki nodded. “The Space Stone is… if it’s October, it’s in the Vault of Asgard. Power Stone’s in space somewhere. The Andromeda Galaxy, if I heard Tho—if I heard correctly.” 

“Oh.” Peter swallowed. That was… a long way.

“I assume our mysterious doctor-wizard has the natural Time Stone of this universe. The Mind Stone is wherever my scepter ended up, and I have no idea about the others.”

Peter jotted down Loki’s words on the corresponding sticky-notes, frowning at what remained. “And… you sure we can’t tell Mr. Stark? We could use his help…”

_ We need his help. We need  _ someone’s  _ help.  _

“Me. Dead. Not a good thing,” Loki said, hurling his knife particularly  _ violently _ at the roof. “I’ve had experience with that, and usually the world continues to exist much more smoothly when I’m around.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. 

“Shut it,” snarled the god.

“I’m just saying…”

“At least you have the logic to realize you cannot kill me, but if you want me dead there are  _ easier ways—” _

Peter cut him off, eyes widening. “What? No, no, that’s not—I don’t want you dead, Mr. Loki.”

Loki watched him, emerald eyes still flashing. 

“I mean it,” Peter said earnestly.

“It would be perfectly logical—”

“Can it with the logic!” Peter almost threw his pencil at the god. “I couldn’t care less about whatever bullshit you’ve decided justifies you’re death. Maybe it’s stupid, maybe you’re manipulating me or lying to me or controlling me or something, just like everyone thinks you would. But even though everyone knows your name, they don’t know  _ you. _ Apparently. I don’t know what was going through your head during the Battle of New York, and I don’t know why you killed all those people, but I’m willing to bet it’s something more than  _ inherent evil.” _

And in an instant, before Peter could move, could flinch, could raise his hands to defend himself, Loki’s knife was at his throat.

“Willing to bet your life?” the god snarled, his voice dripping with almost insane threat.

_ He was going to strike you. _

Peter just lifted his chin, met those razor-sharp emerald eyes, and nodded.

For a long moment, neither of them moved. 

And then Loki’s entire form softened, his knife falling away from Peter’s neck, his shoulders rolling forward, and his feet taking him stumbling a few feet back. Just before his gaze turned from Peter, the boy thought he saw it fracture, thought he saw something cold and desolate reflect across Loki’s chiseled face. 

“Alright then,” came the flat, emotionless reply. 

Peter forced himself to swallow through the lump suddenly in his throat. 

“Mr. Stark would probably assume you had some sort of ‘nefarious’ plan if I told him you were here, you’re right,” Peter said, keeping his voice almost aggressively light. “But… maybe we can prove you mean no harm?”

Loki scoffed. “Good luck with  _ that.” _

Peter shook his head. “I’m serious.” But he couldn’t elaborate, not yet; nothing came to mind on how to solve this problem of mindset.

“He doesn’t even trust  _ you,”  _ Loki said, turning back to Peter and gesturing vaguely to his form. “How could he possibly trust  _ me?” _

“He trusts me! He just…” Peter trailed off.

“Uh-huh.” Loki sighed, making his way over to the drawer where they’d stashed the Infinity Stone. He rifled inside, withdrawing the grimy folded paper that was all they had of the original timeline. 

Peter echoed the sigh and flopped back onto his bed. His fingers tapped sluggishly on the mattress beside him, and his feet bounced where they extended past the edge and into thin air. “Well, fuck,” he said. “What in the—” 

“Peter?”

A knock on the door. Peter was up in milliseconds, and Loki had vaulted back onto the top bunk with two knives clutched in hand, this time. 

“Yes, hi May, gimme two seconds!” 

He turned frantically to Loki, gesticulating wildly. The god raised an eyebrow.

“Do the snakey-thing!” Peter hissed under his breath. “Or… something!”

“The ‘snakey-thing’...” Loki shook his head, but disappeared into something small and serpentine anyway, letting Peter breathe a sigh of relief. 

“Okay…” he murmured, going for the door.

“Hey Pete,” his aunt said, grinning at him as the room opened. “Good evening, so far?”

“Yeah, uh, yeah,” Peter babbled, managing to smile.

_ Great job. Perfectly not suspicious. _

“Ready to go?” his aunt asked, looking him over doubtfully.

“Go?” Peter squeaked. “Go… where?”

And then he noticed Ned behind her, grinning like an absolute idiot and clad in—

Oh fuck. 

Ned was wearing his stetson. Which meant an occasion. Which meant tonight. Which meant he’d told May about Liz’s party, which meant she’d agreed to drive them, which meant Peter was supposed to leave, which meant he had to do something with Loki, which meant saving the world was going to be delayed  _ again— _

“Almost,” Peter said with a panicked smile. 

  
  


“Mr. Loki!” Peter yelped, scaling the final few branches and clambering onto the roof. “You up here?”

“Where else would I be?” was the reply.

Peter rolled onto the shingles, looking around for his Asgardian companion. He didn’t see him for a long moment, until an unnatural shadow caught his eye and he was able to distinguish Loki’s shape against the dark backdrop of the shaded roof.

Peter crouched next to him, rubbing his wrists. He could feel the fabric of his suit beneath, and sighed.

“What is my life…” he groaned. “They all think I know Spider-Man, now. Yu-p. And Ned wants me to show up  _ as  _ Spider-Man and pretend to be someone else.  _ And  _ Michelle is there  _ grinning  _ at me when I already feel like a complete dumbass, and there’s a god on the roof of Liz’s house.”

“Me being here is entirely your fault,” Loki said.

Peter huffed. “Rude.”

“True.”

“I wonder if you could just shank Flash. Maybe that’d solve  _ all  _ my problems.”

Loki stood up. “If you wish.”

Peter burst to his feet, his hands already extended. “Nonononono, that’s not what I—”

But Loki was grinning, smirk flashing with azure amusement, and Peter relaxed and punched his shoulder.

“Hey!” he laughed. “Don’t scare me like that, Mr. Loki.”

“You are a curious child,” the god said, flipping his dagger and catching it by the hilt. “You hardly flinched when I threatened your life, but looked ready to fight had I gone to attack even your enemy.”

“Flash isn’t my enemy. He’s more of my… I don’t know. He’s annoying, and he’s an asshole, but I’ve dealt with plenty of those. I guess I just don’t kill anyone. Ever.” Peter tapped his chin, coming up next to Loki and glancing in through the window of Liz’s house. Ned was standing near the glass, looking nervously around for a superhero he expected to appear. 

“Shit…” Peter sighed. 

“What are you going to do?” Loki asked.

“With Spider-Man? I don’t know. Spider-Man isn’t a party trick, I’m  _ more  _ than that—”  _ I have to be—  _ “but Ned’s expecting me to swing in and ham it up…  _ Everyone’s  _ expecting it…”

“And?”

Peter paused. “And… what?”

“What matter are your not-enemy’s expectations?”

Peter spluttered. “They’re—it’s—it’s not—”

Loki was grinning at him again, and Peter narrowed his eyes.

And then they widened. Because behind Loki, against the navy and orange backdrop of the sky, was an explosion.

“What the hell?” Peter mouthed.

Loki spun to follow Peter’s gaze, his head cocking. “Is that normal?”

“The blue mushroom cloud? Decidedly not.” Peter was already pulling his shirt over his head, exposing the sleek vibrance of his suit. He extended a wrist, but paused when Loki laid a hand over it.

“What are you doing?” the god asked, but from the way his eyes were already sparking with mischief, Peter knew he already knew the answer.

“Checking it out, obviously,” Peter said.

Loki grinned. “I’ll be right behind you.”

Peter pulled his mask over his head, and then Spider-Man was swinging away through the suburb streets of Queens.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There they go a swingin', swingin'... into the plot-line... do todo do do do dodo. 
> 
> aNYWAY
> 
> Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed this, and I'll see you soon!


	11. Up and Down

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Ah, the joys of pre-battle scouting, of the skulking hunt moments before the pounce. This was what Loki loved—though the pounding adrenaline of the fight was nothing unsatisfying, either. But it couldn’t compare to the slow build of stalking a mystery, of a silent infiltration, or of a dark-of night assassination. 

Loki’s magic whipped through his veins like a drug, all-consuming and enthralling. He panted through his teeth as he popped in and out of existence, trailing the spider-child through the dark streets, and kept his eyes on the horizon in the event of another blast.

Together, they made no noise; that suit must be StarkTech for all its whip-quick efficiency. Loki bared his teeth, not caring if his smirk was true and wild, and pushed himself through space once again. 

Peter lead him up to the overhang of a highway, ducking behind the edge as another billowing release of electric blue light exploded up from beneath them. Loki palmed his knives and grinned wickedly at Peter. 

“Criminals, right?” he mouthed.

The Spider-Man mask nodded, but held up a hand when Loki moved to flip over the side.

Reluctantly, Loki followed the boy as he crawled—somehow sticking sideways to the concrete—over the edge of the overpass. Loki sunk his knives into the stone, grunting with the effort, and clung haphazardly next to Peter.

Voices drifted up from the group below. 

“Now, this is crafted from a reclaimed sub-Ultron arm straight from Sokovia,” said a bearded, brutish man, flipping a somewhat unwieldy-looking weapon in hand and offering it to the man beside him. 

This second Midgardian was considerably thinner, darker, and more confused; Loki leaned down a bit further despite the protests of his still-sore body. 

“I wanted something low-key. Why are you trying to upsell me, man?” said the second man. 

Loki glanced toward Spider-Man, tapping a bit of telepathic energy as he mouthed  _ ‘weapons deal?’ _

Spider-Man shrugged. “What else could it be?”

They both turned back to the scene before them. 

“Okay, okay,” chuckled the first man. Loki could see a glint in his eye and a smile on his lip; he was enjoying this. He looked a bit like Thor had when they’d first glimpsed the Valkyries in person—

Loki cut that thought off before it could grow to completion. 

“I got what you need, all right? I got tons of great stuff here.” The man migrated over to his van—white, even in the shadows of the overpass. “One sec. Okay, I got black hole grenades, Chitauri railguns…” 

Loki stopped listening to the tirade as another man spoke—bald, and tall. “You letting off shots in public now? Hurry up.” 

Loki cocked his head, not precisely sure what that meant. His shoulders throbbed with the effort of holding up his body, and he tried not to wince.  _ What’s going on here? _

“Look, times are changing,” the bald Midgardian continued. “We're the only ones selling these high-tech weapons.”

“High tech weapons?” Peter breathed beside him. “That sounds… dangerous.” There was excitement in his voice, and he dropped a bit lower on the overhang. 

Loki gave him a side-eye.  _ I like this one.  _ He couldn’t deny it, this time. 

The second man, the buyer, rubbed his eyes. There was tension in his body language, and Loki wondered if he knew what he was getting into. “I just need something to stick up somebody. I’m not trying to…” He made a helpless gesture towards the van. “Shoot them back in time.”

But a few more words had the slimmer buyer interested, and he migrated toward the vehicle.

And the idiot teenager’s phone rang. 

“Shit—” Peter yelped as the warbling notes rang out through the silent air. Loki snarled, hauling himself back up to the lip of the overpass and drawing his knives. 

Beneath them, the weapons dealers shot to attention, hands tightening on their guns. “Okay, what the hell is that? Did you set us up?” The first one snarled, twisting the barrel of his weapon toward the hastily protesting buyer. 

And Peter dropped to the ground in front of it without a moment of hesitation.

“Wait!” Loki hissed instinctually, his voice almost ringing through the hollowed overhang.

Peter held up his hands and stood unflinchingly before the deadly gun barrels. “Hey! Hey, come on,” he said. “You gonna shoot at somebody, shoot at me!” 

“All right,” said bald man, turning completely toward the boy.

Peter’s wrists were already extended, ripping the weapon from the man’s hands and throwing it sideways on a strand of silken webbing. But the other man, the bearded one, moved faster. 

The discharge of the second gun through Peter up and back, slamming him into the concrete of the overpass.

Loki snarled. 

Vaulting over the edge of the roadway and dropping beside the crumpled boy, Loki’s knives were already spinning across the clearing. The buyer dropped to the ground, just barely avoiding a blade in his navel, but Beardy was not so lucky.

Loki’s knife shattered through the unprotected skull of the first dealer. The man crumbled, his blood arcing into the chill night air, and his partner stumbled back, eyes wide in sudden fear. Loki shrunk back into the shadows of the overpass as the man searched frantically for the hand that through the knife. Loki's tongue curled over his teeth and his fingers working the hilt of his second blade. 

Two things kept said blade from finding its mark in the second man’s throat: Peter groaning and shaking out lethargic wrists, and the brute diving for the open door of the van. As the vehicle roared to life, Peter barked a sluggish curse and threw a strand of webbing for the back hinge. 

The van took off, and Peter took off with it.

“Idiot boy,” Loki growled as the spider-child was yanked arse-first down the pot-holed Queen’s road. The god yanked his knife out of the dead man’s head, ignoring the further cracking of the skull and wiping the blade on the already-filthy leather of his pants. 

The dark streak of Midgardian blood joined the patches of his people, and Loki broke into a sprint after the van.

* * *

 

Peter loved a good thrill ride.

Emphasis on  _ good. _

He was considerably thankful that the fabric of the Spider-Man suit was friction and fray-resistant, because the skin of his ass was definitely  _ not.  _ Even so, being towed at high speeds behind a car along hard ground wasn’t  _ super  _ comfortable. 

“Ah! My butt!” Peter yelped as he hit yet another pothole and bounced inches off the road. 

One of the doors to the van was missing, and Peter could only see one figure within—he wondered where the other man had ended up. As the vehicle collided viciously with a curb, Peter squeezed his eyes shut to avoid the shower of metal and half-built weaponry that sprayed across him. 

The driver glanced wildly back, one hand pressed to his ear: a telephone. Peter widened the eyes of the mask, but still couldn’t make out the form on the man in the vehicle—

Another sharp twist had Peter slamming into the side of a parked car, and his vision flashed black and white. The ricochet of the collision bounced him through a line of trash cans, nose wrinkling under the mask.

“Gross—” he tried to begin, before he was splattered against a brick pillar. He didn’t break. It did.

Not that it was comfortable. That shoulder was  _ definitely  _ going to be sore tomorrow…

And, well, he wasn’t moving anymore. Peter looked up, raising his wrists to find his webbing dragging uselessly from the web-shooters, and he cursed, sending two more quick shots toward the retreating van. But the other door, already weak from the abuse the vehicle had received, broke off and flew off into the sunset like a demented sort of bird.

“Well, guess I’ll have to take a shortcut,” Peter said. He pushed himself into a run, leaping off the sidewalk to slide over a parked car and gain air. 

He’d webbed this neighborhood before, but never in such a hurry; as a result, his swings were maladroit and he crashed through quite a few occupied backyards. Awkwaaaaard… Well, at least it was just him, this time, and not an overzealous god of mischief. 

Speaking of that, where  _ was  _ Loki?

Peter couldn’t dwell on that now, though; he could see the van in the distance, whipping around corners and through side streets. Throwing himself into a high, long arc, Peter bulleted toward the car. There was smoke billowing from the back of it, marking its presence vibrantly against the otherwise-normal neighborhood.

Peter missed the car, just barely, and growled. “Almost got you…” 

A garbage can teleported under his foot, and he tripped over it attempting to get atop another roof—shit, he was causing a  _ mess  _ tonight, wasn’t he?

_ Happy’s gonna be so pissed.  _

No time for that now. Peter scrambled onto the rooftop and ran, shingles coming loose beneath his feet. His enhanced balance kept him easily upright, and he raced faster through the neighborhood, trying to keep the van in sight. 

“Thought you got away from me, didja?” He grinned, panting through his teeth. He was catching up—the van was  _ right there. _ “I got you right where I want you.”

And he did.

His mask’s eyes narrowed, and Peter  _ lept.  _ “Surprise!”

The rush of air past his form had him grinning, and his hands stretched out to throw another web—

Until the rush stopped so suddenly he got whiplash, and his perfect leap warped with something pulling him upward. 

Peter yelped, shock-fueled fear flooding his already adrenaline-filled form. The hands—no, the  _ claws— _ around him only tightened, and Peter tore his gaze away from the ground as it retreated away from him. 

Fuck,  _ fuck  _ the ground was  _ so far away— _

“What the hell?” Peter yelped, craning to look up at what held him.

It looked back. 

Glowing green eyes bored into him, surrounding an otherwise humanoid face framed by steal feathers. The breath left Peter’s lungs; for a moment, he could only think a phantom had snatched him into the sky. 

He was still being pulled up, and all the thoughts were leaving his goddamn mind, replaced with a single fluttering realization— _ spiders can’t fly.  _

And as suddenly as Peter had first been gripped, another creature was slamming into them from above, screeching something awful. The winged ghost—no, not a ghost, a  _ man— _ cursed in surprise, breaking his spell on the surprised spider in his claws. 

Peter struggled, and the vulture-man holding him did too as something black and feathered viciously attacked his face and neck. A bird of some kind, perhaps a raven, with eyes the color of pine trees—

Oh.

Apparently a snake wasn’t Loki’s only other form.

Peter grinned, but it was more like a grimace as he fought to free his wrists, to free anything. The air was thin and cold as he tried to draw breath, and his head was swimming, but it didn’t change the ferocity of his struggles. He clawed at the metal talons around his midsection, trying to get his web shooters pointed at something that could do some good. 

One of the talons pulled away, swiping at Loki instead. A piercing screech hammered into Peter’s skull as the hand made contact and Loki was forced backward, wings beating frantically. The metal replicas on the man’s back beat too, and Peter found himself yanked upward again. Loki followed, angling his wings to try and catch the unnaturally powerful flight speed of whoever was hauling Peter higher above Queens.

_ Shit,  _ shit—

Wind whipped at his mask, at the pins of his web-shooters, and the claws were tight around him. He was starting to notice how hard it was to breathe, now. Logic was starting to be overcome by primitive, survivalist panic.  

A soft beeping filtered through his thoughts, and Peter had just enough time to wonder  _ what the fuck  _ before a force of nature had ripped him from the vulture-man’s claws.

Air resistance, specifically.

A dozen yards of billowing fabric flapped below Peter, already whipping up around him as gravity seized him in an unforgiving grip. Loki screeched as Peter careened into him, forcing them both downward.

There was fabric in his vision, now. Fabric wrapping around him, binding him in flapping sheets of white, turning up into down and the sky into the earth and Peter couldn’t see, couldn’t  _ breathe.  _ The rush of the fall had ripped the air from his lungs, and there was only cloth in his mouth, now. 

Struggling, screaming, Peter tried to break free. His frantic mind had just enough time to think  _ you can’t punch your way out of a paper bag  _ before he hit the water. 

The impact took every conscious thought from his mind. Only instinct kept him from gasping in pain and shock as water swallowed the parachute, the suit, and him inside it. Peter kicked out at the water around him, straining toward the surface, but the fabric—now permeated with water—dragged him down. 

Parachutes weren’t supposed to be heavy, were they? But God, this one was  _ heavy,  _ was unliftable even to his enhanced strength. And everything around him was heavy, was pressing down on him with a horrible, final sort of pressure. 

Water had joined the fabric in his mouth. 

Peter would have screamed, but he was terrified of opening his mouth. Afraid that the pressure would force itself down his throat and into his core. Flashes of color and light made it through the eyes of the mask to his own gaping gaze. His senses were screaming, overloading in stimulation that made panic claw at his insides. He discharged his web shooters, but they only splintered and dissolved within the water, leaving Peter to be dragged down, down,  _ down.  _

Everything sounded loud and foggy at the same time. Everything looked the same—light, but indistinguishable. 

It felt like eternity as the light began to go dark. As the sounds began to filter to nothing.

Peter’s final thought before the blackness took him was  _ oh, fuck, Loki. _

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hehe?
> 
> Thanks for reading. XD


	12. (An Argument Could be Made for Fifteen)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a bird, it's a plane... IT'S A TONY PERSPECTIVE!
> 
> This is the first time I've written Tony since... yeah. I only feel a little bit like sobbing again, thank you very much.
> 
> Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Moving permanently to the Compound was a debatable decision. 

Oh, said Compound was definitely less comfortable, less organized, and less thought-through than the Tower, but since when did that say anything about being  _ worse? _

The environment here was a thousand times more preferable. The quiet rhythm of the bay’s waves lapping up against the Compound’s supports echoed through the hallways, even with the windows closed. Autumn wind rustled through yellowing leaves and sent the loose ones spiraling into the glass and across the roads and helicopter pad. You’d never open a window to the smell of salt and harvest soil in the heart of New York.

Tony Stark stood with his hands clasped behind his back and his foot tapping lightly against the smooth concrete of the Compound patio. The stuff was barely a year old. It still had that ridged surface unique to asphalt poured in block castings. 

Whole parts of the Compound still seemed so new. There were rooms that smelled of paint and plywood, unopened storage space covered in fiberglass dust. The training bay was already smooth and permeated with the aroma of sweat and effort, but that was alright. It could be, at least. And fuck if he was ever going to enter what had been the living quarters.

All in all, it was better, Tony decided. Not perfect, but better; clean and sharp and not yet soiled by the broken legacy he couldn’t help but leave. 

He inhaled a gulping breath of the crisp morning air and nodded. All that trouble of selling the Tower was worth it. And it wasn’t like they hadn’t gained a couple of bucks offloading the steller building onto some poor millionaire willing to pay for the top-notch real estate smack in the center of New York, self-sustaining and a beacon of historical innovation. 

And yes, he knew it was cheesy, but that didn’t stop it selling. 

Tony flexed his fingers and started abruptly down the steps before him, treading into the still-lush grass of the lawn and trying to resist collapsing onto it.

Keyword ‘trying’. 

“Aaaahhh yes,” Tony sighed, staring up at the lightening sky. Cool grass tickled the nape of his neck, and he could feel its texture through the thin fabric of his T-shirt. “I could get used to this.”

The beauty, the opportunity, the size, the  _ atmosphere.  _

The emptiness.

Tony turned his head, casting his eyes along the upside-down skyline of the Compound. A single light was on, just one, and likely only because FRIDAY hadn’t yet flipped it off upon his passing. It was quiet, yes, empty, sure, but it had the potential—see, the  _ potential— _ to be filled. 

By soldiers. Agents. Avengers.

Teammates. 

And maybe, someday, friends.

Tony wasn’t opposed to the idea of those, despite what Pepper and Happy seemed to have decided. He was simply acutely aware that they were just that—an idea. And his ideas tended to be questionable. 

His friends too, apparently.

But the Compound, the Compound was new, still new, and the  _ A  _ towering above everything didn’t yet blink down at him with ice blue eyes or red and silver wings or a shadow of red and black. 

“Stop,” Tony muttered, running his hands through his spiking hair. “We aren’t thinking about this now.” Not when he was feeling so balanced and decisive and  _ good. _

The Compound wasn’t going to be empty much longer, anyway; Vision had already started setting up his room. Suite. Space. Building. Hell if Tony couldn’t spoil his AI; FRIDAY’d back him up on that.

Vision and FRIDAY; the two individuals Tony confidently placed on his  _ to be trusted  _ list. The other three were tentative—he hated that they were, but two short months couldn’t cover the pit of doubt Siberia had hollowed in his heart. Two short months didn’t stop him trying to protect himself. 

Tony was finished being angry. He was finished being anxious, finished being determined, too—he was just  _ finished. _

Tired. 

So fucking  _ tired,  _ tired of the Tower, tired of the cameras and interviews, tired of the nightmares, tired of the thoughts, tired of the  _ lies.  _

So he was starting over, because the world had left him no choice. It was start over or be slowly devoured by his idiotic mind and its inability to stop  _ questioning  _ the words of  _ everyone around him!  _

He’d always questioned himself; that hadn’t changed, and probably never would. But his subconscious seemed determined to establish that there was nothing in this godforsaken world that he could trust.

Untrue. He could trust the cool autumn air of the new Avengers facility. He could trust the lush grass beneath him. He could trust his suit to fly and the ground to be there when he fell, and he could trust his hands to assemble things of wonder.

He could trust Vision, all curious understanding and innocent empathy, worthy of so much more than this world. He could trust FRIDAY, a product of so much more than him.

And god dammit, Tony  _ could  _ trust Pepper, Rhodey, and Happy. He wouldn’t have left the latter to look out for the kid he’d desperately recruited to Germany if not. They deserved his trust, and that was alright. 

He didn’t, but that was alright, too.

Sighing, Tony rolled onto his stomach and pushed himself to his knees. He’d need to leave soon in order to get to the jet on time—he had to be across the globe in India later today. But he’d wanted to see the Compound in the morning, and it was a good thing he had; he would have missed the gorgeous October sunrise and a good bit of metacognition. 

Tony stood and brushed the grass off his thighs, then spun on his heel and stalked back into the Compound. FRIDAY lightened the windows as he passed, and he smiled up at the ceiling as if she could see. 

“What’s our timeline, FRI?”

“Fifteen minutes until the latest you should leave, boss.”

“Perfect. I can be fashionably early.” Tony winked at the empty hallway.

“Indeed.”

He navigated the connected buildings for a good five minutes, dodging and weaving through the area until he reached where he’d left the car. FRIDAY flashed lights as he went, almost chasing him through the hallways, and he allowed himself a flicker of a grin as his pace sped to a sprint.

There was no one here to see it, anyway. 

He slid back outside and into the driver’s seat of his yellow Audi—should he take it with him to India? Yes, yes he should—and didn’t linger as he pulled into drive and out away from the Compound. FRIDAY  _ pinged  _ into consciousness within the car; she had the same access to all the electronics and locations JARVIS had had, and Tony would never dream of locking her out. She deserved every small freedom he could give her a thousand times over. 

The mural of the swooping, bold  _ A  _ gleamed in the Audi’s rear-view mirror as Tony drove away. He resisted the urge to flip it off. FRIDAY was here, after all, and he shouldn’t pull shit like that in front of her—she was still just a child, really, even for an AI. 

“Well then,” Tony murmured, sitting back and tapping his hands on the steering wheel. “Off we go to India.”

  
  


Tony lingered easily in the center of the party, his traditional white and red  _ kurta  _ glinting in the warm sunlight streaming through the skylights. His sunglasses were purely for show, almost completely untinted, and he tilted his head down to observe over the frames as he conversed with a fellow guest before him.

The wedding was a loud, somewhat arduous affair, but Tony was loving it. He didn’t know these people, he had no reason to trust them and thus no reason to feel guilty about not doing so, and it lifted an ironic weight from his shoulders as he celebrated. Surrounded by foreign strangers, Tony could truly enjoy himself—but for aggressively ignoring how fucked up that was. 

The flicking blue monitor over the lenses of his sunglasses had been pushed aside. He kept the glasses on, though, just in case; the world seemed to have a nasty habit of ending on the drop of a pin.

Hat. Whatever. He needed another drink.

Pepper was at a similar party in the States; stressing company ties, she called it. Tony couldn’t help but wish, in some lonely part of his mind, that she was here with him, instead. Or that he was there with her, trying to work up the courage to do something. Anything. Everything.

He didn’t have a lot of courage left, though. He needed most of it for opening his eyes in the morning. 

Shifting against the table behind him, Tony straightened his collar and tuned back into the words of the man in front of him. He was wrapping up, having spotted another thread of gossip elsewhere in the party, and Tony entertained his keen conversation for a few more moments before he disappeared.

Tony spun back to the room, after a moment, beginning to travel back into the throng. He bent to pick up a fallen marigold, tucked it into the folds of his scarf, and swayed a bit to the spiraling music flickering through the space.

A woman joined him, and Tony embarrassed himself for about half a song before she realized how hopeless he was at utilizing this sort of music and took the lead. In his average gala, wedding, business gathering, or party of varying stuffiness, Tony could control the dance floor as he controlled the room—heaven help a billionaire that didn’t know how to dance. 

But here?  _ Something  _ productive would come of this wedding, besides Pep’s company ties—Tony’d learn to dance to traditional Indian music.

Eventually, he ended up on the sidelines again, leaning up against the white-carved base of a support pillar. He whipped off his scarf—his neck was slick with sweat in the slightly stuffy air—and wrapped it around his wrists for a moment.

It snagged on the metal of his watch, yanking the device somewhat painfully on his carpal bones. Tony worked it back up to a comfortable niche of his muscle and pulled his shirt cuff down over it, as the bulky elegance of the watch contrasted unprofessionally with his outfit.

He could have worn a sleeker one, a matching one. It wasn’t as though he’d used this for anything other than telling the time in months.

But again, the world had a nasty habit of ending on a whim. 

Most of Tony’s watches were equipped with sensors and receivers that would call his suit, but only this one had the capacity for nanotech expansion over his hand and now the entirety of his upper arm. He was still working on slimming the power containment unit down to fit into something flatter and less obvious, but for now, this worked.

People knew him for that—the suit, the nanotech, the sleek watches and sleeker smiles. They’d remember him for it, too. 

Sometimes, on bad nights, sitting in the dark of his workshop with only the blue light of a hologram skittering in his irises, Tony wondered if he wanted that. If the suit and the nanotech and the sleek watches were what he wanted to be remembered for. 

What  _ did  _ he want? What did he want to be known for?

_ Terrorist weapons, Hammer, Mandarin, Ultron, Sokovia, Germany— _

Not now.  _ Not now. _

Tony took a shaking breath, clasping his hands before him and dropping his chin to his chest. He focused on the way the coarse fabric of his  _ kurta  _ felt against his neck as his chest shifted, in and out, like waves lapping against the supports of the Compound.

“Boss?” came the quiet static from his sunglasses.

Tony looked up abruptly. “What is it, FRI?”

“The Spider-Man suit’s parachute just deployed.”

Tony stiffened.

The Spiderling, the overexcited puppy he’d practically kidnapped and brought to Germany two months ago, the hero he’d been tracking via YouTube long before. He’d started building the suit as a pet project a while back, never intending to do anything with it—but then the Accords had happened and he’d needed backup, so he’d reopened the file and its half-assembled prototype. 

And after, he’d met a curious, excited, responsible boy in a run-down Queens apartment, and the suit had exploded in capabilities. 

Including a bullet-resistant makeup, parachute, heater, tracker, and about six protocols alerting Tony in times of crisis.

Said protocols had just activated. And said parachute had just deployed. 

“Where. When.” Tony’s voice came sharp and quick. 

“Above the East River and Little Neck Bay bridge. Throgs Neck,” FRIDAY said, a whir of worry in her electronic voice. “Just now.”

“How’d he get up there—” the parachute was a height-sensitive feature in the suit, and the kid would have had to reach all but lethal elevation for it to activate— “never mind, it’s not important.” Tony flicked the corner data of his sunglasses to cover the entirety of their lenses, hacking into the WiFi in seconds. “Get a suit over there,  _ now.” _

“Yes, boss.” 

Tony’s grip tightened on his wrists. Symbols danced across the lenses of his glasses, FRIDAY pulling up the vitals and signals from Parker’s suit on one side and charting the movements of Tony's unmaned suit on the other. 

“Why isn’t he slowing down?” Tony demanded, pushing off from the pillar behind him as though  _ anything he could do would do any good— _

“It appears his orientation kept the parachute from performing functionally. I can only assume he’s tangled in it.”

_ Shit.  _ “Access the feed from the Baby Monitor Protocol. Bring it up left lens.”

FRIDAY obliged, and Tony’s eye-sized screen filled with a chaotic pinwheel of skyline and water, the sound of rushing wind replacing the AI’s voice in his ear.

And a scream.

A helpless, breathless scream as white fabric replaced the sky and the water but the wind kept rushing, ever faster.

Tony’s fingernails had broken his skin, now. “How long?” he bit out.

“The suit will be there in twenty seconds, sir.”

Not fast enough, not  _ fast  _ enough—the kid was going to hit the water and Tony  _ couldn’t do a single fucking thing. _

He heard the collision, jaring and cold even in the crackling feed of the Baby Monitor Protocol. Tony winced, forcibly loosening his grip from his wrists and tapping at the sides of the sunglasses—fifteen seconds.

The stats for the drone suit whirred on the other lens, FRIDAY highlighting the ones she deemed important. But they were already as fast as they could get, as close as they could be.

Ten seconds.

Tony’s left lens had emptied—no, it was showing the blackness pressing down on the Spiderling, the murky depths of the Queens all around. 

Five seconds.

He couldn’t swim for the surface, not with Tony’s parachute binding his limbs together and weighing him down. Enhanced strength didn’t have any impact against the borders of a water-filled sack. Against water in general—Tony knew the feeling. 

The suit broke the surface of the bay with a  _ boom _ Tony could hear through the Protocol, and something clenching in his chest released. He drew a breath, minimizing the view from the Spider-Man suit in favor of the view from his own. 

“Did you get him?” 

FRIDAY darkened and lightened the display in her imitation of a nod. “Yes, sir. Leaving the water…Now.”

Tony blew out a long breath, slumping back against the pillar again. “So… the parachute has a few bugs to work out.”

“Indeed, boss. Where should we take Mr. Parker?” 

“Drop him off…” Tony scanned the skyline he could see through the suit’s eyes. “There. It’s closer to his apartment.”

FRIDAY kicked the suit into action again, and cradling the boy beneath the armpits, they flew across the remainder of the water. In the small window still reserved for Baby Monitor, Tony saw Peter’s eyes flicker open. 

“Huh?” he said groggily—sounding disoriented and confused, but okay. Unhurt. “Oh. Hi.”

Tony opted not to respond, fighting away the small grin of relief and adjusting so the sharp right-angles of the pillar base didn’t dig into the small of his back so painfully. 

They dropped the kid on a lakeside jungle-gym, shooing away a bedraggled-looking bird. It’s feathers were fully soaked, and it regarded the suit with a look equating murder; no wonder ravens were a bad sign. Parker landed gracefully on the brightly painted bars, looking no worse for wear from his little tyst with death, and pulled off his mask to shake the water from his helmet.

“Okay, what happened.” It wasn’t a question. Tony crossed his arms, and the suit emulated. 

“Well,” the kid began, looking up at the suit with wide eyes, “I saw this explosion from the roof of my friend’s house—”

Tony, again, opted not to interrupt and ask what he’d been doing in his suit on a friend’s roof.

“—and when I went to see what it was, there were, like, these guys selling  _ crazy _ weapons.” Parker gesticulated with wild excitement. “And I chased after them for a bit, but right when I was about to catch up, this guy in a flying suit—not like yours, way less…” The kid turned his gesture on Tony’s suit. “... Elegant.”

Tony tried not to scoff.

Parker continued, wringing the water out of his mask, “And then he just, he just, like, swooped down like a  _ monster  _ and he picked me up and, uh, he took me up, like, a thousand feet and just—wait, did you find a bird?”

Tony was thrown off for a moment. “There was a scruffy one just now, if you’re after something specific,” he said with a hint of amusement.

“No, I was, um, just wondering? Bird’s not important.”

Tony wished his suit could raise an eyebrow.

The kid took a deep breath, and his thoughts trundled along to catch up with his mouth. “How’d you find me?” he asked. There was a bit of a tremor in his words—he was shivering. “Did you put a tracker in my suit or something?”

“I put everything in your suit,” Tony said, tapping on the edge of his sunglasses. “Including this heater.”

He expanded the view from his own suit over both lenses, and watched as Spider-Man immediately dried, sending a cloud of steam flurrying up around Parker. 

“Woah,” the boy breathed. “That’s better. Thanks.” He snuggled back against the bars of the jungle-gym, glancing down at the wet raven now hopping about the wood chips of the playground. 

He looked so young. Fourteen? 

Someone had just dropped him from thousands of feet. And even the suit couldn’t protect—stop his fall.

“What were you thinking?” Tony said, his words coming out snappish. Harsh.

The boy straightened instantly to the defensive, his spine uncurling and his shoulders pushing down into his back. “The guy with the wings is obviously the source of the weapons. I gotta take him down.”

Tony rubbed at his eyes. “Take him  _ down  _ now, huh?” A razor-winged, flying enigma dealing high-tech weapons to common criminals? Yeah, sorry kid;  _ no.  _ “Steady, Crockett, there are people who  _ handle  _ this sort of thing.”

Parker stuck out his chin. “The Avengers?”

Tony chuckled. “No, no, no. I think this is a little below their  _ pay grade.”  _

The kid ran a hand through his soaked hair and sighed. “Anyway, Mr. Stark, you didn’t have to come all the way out here. I had that. I was fine.”

_ Uh-huh, sure.  _

“Oh I’m not—” Tony waved a hand, and the mask of the unmaned suit flipped up— “here.” 

He pretended not to notice the way the light in Parker’s eyes flickered. 

“Thank God this place has WiFi,” Tony continued quickly, “or you would be  _ toast  _ right now. Thank Ganesh, while you’re at it.”

He swiped a drink from a passing waiter, raising the glass in a mock toast as thanks.

“Cheers.” Holding in a sigh, Tony turned his attention back to the lenses afront his eyes. “Look, forget the flying vulture-guy, please.”

Parker glared at him. “Why?” _  
_ “Why?” Tony snarled a bit. _Because he nearly killed you—he would have, if this wedding didn’t have WiFi. If FRIDAY had been fifteen seconds slower. If a thousand and one things now stirred into my nightmare collection had and could happen!_ “Because I said so!”

A guest approaching him paused, confusion evident on her rounded face, and Tony waved an expanding hand. “Sorry,” he said, leaning down to accept a string of marigolds. “Talking to a teenager.” 

Tony sighed, focusing his attention back on the lenses before him. He had to get back to the States—he had to just generally get out of here. It was stuffy and unwieldy and he’d rather just be home, thank you very much. 

“Stay… stay close to the ground, okay? Build up your game helping the little people. There’s that string of strange ATM robberies—which, now that I think of it—”

“Is probably connected to this.” The kid braced his wrists on his knees. “I saw, uh, some of the footage on the news, and it looked like something these guys could pull off!”

FRIDAY, the obliging young AI that she was, was already pulling up said footage on the left lens of the sunglasses. The kid did, unfortunately, have a point, and Tony resisted the urge to rub his eyes again. 

“Can’t you just be…” he searched for words, taking a sip of his drink, “a friendly, neighborhood Spider-Man?”

Peter lifted his chin, gesticulating with a vibrating sort of energy. “But I’m ready for  _ more  _ than that, now!”

_More? What ‘more’? More that’ll have you dead at the bottom of a Queens harbor where no one ever finds your body?_ “No, you’re not.”  
He was frustrating the boy—good. The boy was frustrating _him._

“That’s not what you said when I took on Captain America!” 

Tony winced, and he was, for once, glad he  _ wasn’t  _ there in person. “Trust me, kid, if Cap wanted to lay you out, he would’ve.” He made his way away from the crowd, trekking a beeline toward his car. “Listen to me. If you come across these weapons again, call Happy.”

“I thought you said this  _ wasn’t  _ Avenger’s business?”

“Yeah, well, Happy’ll set you up with someone whose business it  _ is.” _

_ Possibly me. But oh well.  _

He slipped into the driver’s seat, revving the car to life. 

Parker heard. “Are you  _ driving?” _

Tony ignored him, shifting in the expensive leather to keep it from sticking to his suit. “You know, it’s never too early to start thinking about college. I got some pull at MIT.” He looked to FRIDAY’s sensor. “End call.”

He waited a moment for the order to run to completion, then let his head fall onto the ridge of the steering-wheel. “What the hell am I going to do with that kid, FRI?”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wooo!!! 
> 
> This was a fun chapter, cuz I really wanted to find a way to write Tony that wasn't identical to how I wrote him in the Waterspout. We sorted through THOSE problems over there; this is a different story, and I wanted a new emphasis to go with it. I think I like this one, with the trust and legacy focus. Idk. That's what I was going for, at least. XD we'll see.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Drop me some feedback? See you soon. :)


	13. Nefarious Plans

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Loki tumbled back into his humanoid form hissing.

“That utter and  _ complete _ arse-hole!” 

Peter yelped in surprise, toppling through the bars of the jungle-gym and landing with a huff on the wood chips beneath. “Mr. Loki…”

_ “Apologies,”  _ Loki hissed, twisting his fingers into an aggressive Asgardian flip-off in the direction of the retreating suit. “But what the fuck?”

“It’s fine,” Peter sighed. He stood up and ducked through the bars of the jungle gym, making his way over to Loki, who watched him with narrowed eyes. “He thinks I’m just a kid and I know I’m not and it’s whatever.”

But Loki could very clearly see that it was not  _ whatever.  _

How could these Midgardians be such  _ idiots?  _

They were meant to trust each other, protect each other. The wizard had told Loki it was the clearest aspect of the timelines, the most consistent factor across dimensions—Tony Stark and Peter Parker. How could they not  _ see?  _ How could Stark not see how revealing an empty suit crushed a hidden part of this boy’s spirit? 

“Are all your interactions like that?” Loki demanded. 

Peter cringed a bit, biting his lower lip. “Not all of them…”

“You’ve had a total of three interactions with him, I suspect.” Loki sighed, rubbing the bridge of his nose.

“More than that! It’s just—he’s him, and I’m…”

“You?”

“Yeah.” Peter’s voice was quiet. Defeated. “Me.” 

_ Exactly!  _ Loki wanted to scream.  _ There’s no need for change! He’s your realm-damned father and it’s a fucking universal constant! _

Maybe he should scream it. Maybe that’s what they needed. 

But understanding someone, trusting someone, didn’t come from a word of recommendation, even if that word came from a friend. And especially not if that word came from a deranged ex-criminal trickster god. Loki wondered if Peter would humor him, or just laugh outright at a claim the boy’d see as ridiculous and possibly even condescending.

And Tony Stark?

Loki’s lip lifted, exposing his upper canine in a snarl. Part of him—okay, most of him—wanted to stab the pretentious idiot until he saw sense. Which was probably just once, depending on the location Loki chose to insert his blade, and was likely not the most effective method of getting his point across. 

Though it did bring him a bit of joy to imagine. 

“What are we gonna do?” Peter wondered, more to himself than to Loki. “I guess I still thought… I dunno, that he’d help with this whole time-travel thing.”

Loki watched him, expression unchanging. 

“But he won’t even help with the weapons! And I’m supposed to, what, just drop everything and ignore them and the ATM robbers? Un-freaking-likely.”

Loki nodded, trying not to look too pleased with the boy. “Indeed. Ignore trouble? Definitely not.”

“These guys could hurt people! And anyone with normal firearms would be  _ way  _ outta their league.” Peter gesticulated. “I have to—he can’t just—argh!”

But Loki had stopped listening, now frowning at the air in front of Peter. 

_ If you come across these weapons again, call Happy.  _

These two were so  _ intent  _ on alienation from each other—everyone on the damned wizard’s list was intent on alienation. And Loki was supposed to bring these people together, to prepare them for the mission of the Stones. With the nonexistent communication and team-building skills of Loki of Asgard, he was supposed to cultivate a group to take on the Mad Titan. 

Talk about impossible. But perhaps…

_ Below the Avengers’ pay-grade.  _ What exactly  _ was  _ the Avengers’ pay-grade?

Perhaps, starting with the spider-child and Stark, he could solve this. With his own…  _ specialized  _ skill set.

A slow smile spread across Loki’s face.

* * *

 

Peter dragged his feet slightly as the two of them made their way back through the suburb, retracing the curves the van had taken. He winced at each dilapidated roadside structure they came across, but couldn’t quite bring himself to ignore the chain of carnage and tried instead to judge the scale of damage. It wasn’t… as bad as it could have been, he supposed.  
“You’re smiling again,” he observed, glancing at Loki. 

The Asgardian had been…  _ grinning  _ ever since they’d started back toward the heart of Queens. But not just grinning—this was a festering sort of smile, and it made Peter distinctly suspicious.

Loki hopped atop a toppled trash can, his ripped and filthy cape flicking out behind him. “I simply realized the advantages my… image… could provide us as we seek to destroy this weapons ring. I assume we  _ are  _ going to ignore Stark’s orders, correct?”

“Um…” Peter flushed. “Not… ignore… exactly?”

Loki’s eyebrow crept up.

Peter continued quickly, “And we aren’t destroying them. No killing people, remember?”

Loki looked away.

Stopping in his tracks, Peter glared at the god. “Don’t tell me you…”

“He shot you with a Chitauri blast!” the god said, as though that explained everything. “I shot him back.” 

Peter rubbed his face with his hands. “Mr. Loki… that guy was more than just a brute with a gun; he was a person. He could have had a future, he could have had a family...”

“So do you.” Loki stared him down.

“I can’t… I…”

There was a man dead. A man who could have been alive tomorrow, who could of smiled or laughed again, now wiped out of history for good. Because of  _ Peter.  _ He took a breath, finding it heavy and cold against the knot in his chest. 

A flicker of concern softend Loki’s expression. “Spiderling?”

Peter squared his shoulders. “I don’t kill people. I  _ don’t. _ Not if I don’t have to.”

“Of course not,” Loki said. “Last I checked, it was my knife breaking skulls.”

Peter tried not to shiver. “If you want to help me, you have to agree to do the same. Not kill people, I mean.”

Loki grimaced. “What do you suggest I do instead?”

“Knock them out. Otherwise incapacitate them. I don’t care! Unless they’re gonna end up killing you, don’t… stoop to their level.”

Frowning, the god started walking again. “You see battle as… wrong?”

“I see pointless death as wrong. It doesn’t matter who’s dying; we should do  _ everything  _ we can to prevent it!”

“Including kill?”

Peter growled, speeding his steps and slipping in front of Loki. He walked backward in order to look the god in the eye and said, “Are you not listening to me? Just… if you want to help me, no more murdering people.” 

Loki sighed, averting his eyes, and Peter took that as a victory. “Fine. I will not apologize for my actions tonight, but I will change them going forward.”

“Thank you.” Peter nodded a bit stiffly. “Now, what were you saying about your ‘image’ or—ah!”

His foot landed on something that was distinctly  _ not  _ the sidewalk, and Peter’s voice squawked away to nothing. He pinwheeled his arms, finding his balance again as he stumbled over the object, looking even to himself like a deranged parrot. 

“What was—” 

On the sidewalk between Loki and Peter was a gun. 

“Oh.”

Peter knelt, poking at the shaft of metal and pulsing light hesitantly. The thing was somewhat cylindrical, shattered on the edges to expose bits of wire and shards of metal, and contained a heart of crackled, phasing light. It didn’t explode, or burn him, or go off on contact, and Peter looked up. Loki met his eyes, his smile growing wider. 

“Woah,” Peter said and poked the thing again.  
Loki joined him, nimble fingers dancing across the glowing tech. “Think we might have a lead?” 

Peter mirrored the god’s smile. “I think we might.”

As he stood, cradling the wrecked gun in hand, the shrill yodel of Ned’s ringtone split the night. Again. 

Handing the weapon to Loki without really thinking, Peter fumbled for his phone. Loki took it with a flicker in his expression Peter was too preoccupied to try and read, and Peter quickly pressed the phone to his ear.

“Hey man, what’s up? I was just on my way back,” he lied.

“Actually, I was calling to say maybe you shouldn’t come,” Ned said with a sigh. “Listen to this.”

A crackling chorus came through the phone: Flash and most of the school harmonizing Peter’s derogatory nickname. Peter was torn between rolling his eyes and wincing. 

“Sorry, Peter. I guess we’re still losers. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Peter nodded. “See you tomorrow in school.”

He hung up—Ned was never the first to leave a conversation on the off chance whoever it was he was talking to still had something to say. It was something Peter’d learned about his friend through osmosis over the years. 

He sighed, stuffing his phone back into his pocket and shrugging at Loki. “Back home then.”

“Taking the… gun thing with us,” Loki agreed. He turned the shaft over in his hands, then swept his ragged cloak aside and secured it to his belt. 

There were still stains on the garments, dark and bold. Peter wondered how much of it was blood. And how much was from the man Loki’d killed not half an hour before.  

“We gotta get you some new clothes,” Peter said. “Ot at least wash those ones.”

He wasn’t exactly sure how he expected the god to react to the suggestion, but it wasn’t what he got; a sharp aversion of the eyes and a pursing of the lips as Loki said, “yes, that would be preferable.”

“O-okay,” Peter said. “I’ll do a load tonight.”

“A load?”

“Of laundry.”

The god nodded. “Wonderful.”

Peter wracked his brain for something the god could wear during said laundry cycle, and decided he’d burn that bridge when he came to it.

* * *

 

“What are these?”

“They’re sweatpants,” the spider-child said, as though that explained  _ anything at all.  _ “I think they’re the only things I have big enough to fit you.”

“These—” Loki held the offending garment between finger and thumb— “are not  _ pants.  _ These are… something  _ fuzzy  _ and far, far worse.”

“It’s just for a night!” Peter was smiling, and it didn’t please Loki in the least. “You might even find them nice.”

Loki tried not to hiss. “Never.”

“C’mon, you know those filthy clothes are gonna start stinking soon. To people  _ without  _ enhanced senses,” he added pointedly.

Snapping his gaze to the boy, Loki found an innocent grin and wide eyes. 

“I can’t believe I’m letting you talk me into this, mortal,” Loki sighed. 

“Me neither. Oh, and here’s the sweatshirt to go with it.” 

_ Just kill me now. _

Peter left the room, trying to hide his laughter as Loki scowled at the grey and green mounds of thick fabric in his hands. 

But the boy was right—his armor was filthy, filthy with blood and sweat and the dust of a destroyed ship, and Loki couldn’t wear them for a moment longer. So he striped, peeling the tight clothing from his bruised body, and piled it carefully on the spinning chair beside him. The fabric stuck to the scabs on his thighs and shoulders and Loki winced when they pulled open. 

Though he hated to admit it, the soft inner lining of the pants and shirt was quite comfortable against the raw areas of his skin. He craned his neck to observe the baggy sleeves and slowly, hesitatingly, stuffed his hands into the single front pocket of the shirt.

Then he cringed and immediately removed them.

Helheim, he looked like Thor did whenever he tried to go undercover.

Loki frowned. If it was late 2016… Thor would find him in Asgard in about ten months. And then Saakar, all the time they’d spend there before Ragnarok, before Thanos invaded their homeless, starboard nation.

Thor’d have so little time. 

Loki scrubbed his face with his hands, and the elastic sleeves of his awkward garment flopped against his wrists. Then he turned, gathered his grimey clothing into a ball, and knocked softly on the door of Peter’s room.

The kid slipped back in in seconds, looking Loki up and down.

“You look good,” he began.

“Not a word.”

Peter just grinned, and Loki averted his face to avoid being tricked into doing the same. The boy took his clothes and ducked into the corner of the room, grabbing a basket by the literal tips of his fingers and hauling it towards the door.

Loki stopped him. “How are you doing that?”

“What? Oh, the sticking thing?”

Loki nodded.

Peter set down the basket, resting it on his toes, and flexed his fingers. “I started after the spider bit me. Goes with the rest of my powers, I suppose. But I think it has to do with van der waals interactions and electron shells, like geckos and stuff.”

“Are you speaking in…” Loki searched his memory. “‘References’ again?”

Peter laughed. “No, it’s a science thing. Atoms and electrons and stuff.”

“Ah.” 

“I can do it through clothes and things though, so it’s probably more complex than just the van der waals; maybe it’s a friction thing that I manipulate?” Peter shrugged, picking up the basket again. “Not sure.”

“So it’s magic.”

A chuckle. “Quite possibly. I’ll be right back.” 

The boy ducked back out, towing the laundry with him, and Loki made his way back to the window. He folded himself up on the sill like he had the night before, hugging his knees to his chest and resting his head against the wood behind him. The hood of the sweatshirt bunched uncomfortably against his shoulders, and Loki winced.

When Peter came back in, the hood was pulled awkwardly over Loki’s ears, and the god glared at him, daring him to speak a single word.

Peter, impressively, kept a straight face, climbing into his own bed. “We’ll make more… nefarious plans tomorrow,” he said with a yawn. 

Loki nodded. “It’s an oath.”

  
  


Two hours later, clad in baggy sweats and a hoodie, Loki of Asgard slipped from the window and out into the unsleeping dark of Queens. It took not fifteen minutes to find his way to the overpass where the body of the bearded dealer still lay undiscovered. 

Loki carefully kept his clothes out of the gore and dipped his fingers into the nearly-dry pool of blood aside the man’s head. With a few quick strokes, three perfect Asgardian runes darkened the pavement above the corpse.

Loki was back in Peter’s window before the rest of the blood had dried. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I irrationally enjoyed this.
> 
> Thanks for reading! You know you I feel about feedback *wink wink*, and I'll see you soon!


	14. An Anxious Sort of Energy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have been waiting for this moment.

 

**Dreamscape-200004, Adjacent Astral Plane:** **_May 2018_ **

 

“How long until we get there?”  
Tony raised an eyebrow at the kid and looked him up and down. He’d been doing that a lot for the past couple of hours, as though he could cement this into his memory; Peter with the gleam of youth still in his eyes, excited and healthy.

Alive.

“This isn’t a road-trip,” Tony said. “I’m not going to answer ‘how much longer’ questions.”

Peter raised his hands in surrender. “I just thought, y’know, that you might—”

“About four and a half hours.” Tony rolled his eyes.

“Okay, great! Karen and I are gonna go exploring.”

Tony started forward slightly. “Wha—where?”

Peter shrugged. “Just around. I mean, we’re on an alien spaceship! There’s gotta be some cool stuff around here, maybe something that’ll be helpful later.”

Relaxing, Tony waved an expansive hand. “Fine, yes. Stay close, though. And don’t go shooting yourself into space, young man.”

Peter chuckled. “I’ll be careful.”

“You better be.”

With a haughty little grin, Peter webbed the gangplank above them and swung backward. He already moved with flawless grace in the metallic nanotech of the new suit, and he kept his head uncovered. Tony thought he heard the boy’s eager voice as he spoke to Karen. Figuring the AI had bonded enough to Peter, Tony had programmed her to remain active constantly within the Iron Spider suit, and he didn’t regret it. 

Fighting off a smile, Tony turned back to the… windshield? The stars didn’t push in on his psyche with as much pressure as they had before, which was good. Tony aggressively kept his eyes on them; they didn’t control him, anymore. 

Four and a half hours. What was his plan? Maybe he’d take a page out of Peter’s book and wander around the ship for a little bit.

Tony turned, and his gaze was caught by the only shred of color in the grayscale ship: the splash of deep red that was the wizard’s overly sentient garment. He was about to look away, to continue through the cockpit, but he couldn’t help but notice the form curled within said garment.

Strange looked like shit, to put it kindly. He hadn’t when they’d talked, when the wizard had promised he’d let them die for the rock around his neck, but now he seemed to contract into the folds of his Cloak, eyes closed and jaw clenched. 

Tony remembered how ragged his screams had been.

_ Oh, damn it.  _ Sighing, the engineer started off across the gangway, fiddling with the strings of his hoodie. His steps echoed on the metal floor, and Strange looked up sharply. In seconds, the weakness Tony had glimpsed fell away from the wizard’s form. But Tony could still see the ache in his eyes. 

“Hey, Strange,” he said, keeling next to the wizard. 

“Stark.”

“You alright?”

Strange regarded him, expression impassive. “Fine.”

Tony swept his legs beneath him and sat, grunting as he made himself comfortable. “I mean, Voldemort did just stick you full of needles, so I suppose it’s justified.”

“I’ve had worse.” The Cloak tightened around Strange, somewhat protectively.

Tony shrugged. “It’s not a competition. Just because you’ve hurt before doesn’t mean you don’t hurt now. Trust me.”

Shoulders raising slightly, Strange looked away, and Tony took that as an admission. 

“What do you need?” he asked. “Not that I’ve got much to work with, but hey.”

The wizard looked at him sharply. “Why would you help me? I just told you I’d watch you and your…” Strange waved a hand expansively, “die without lifting a finger.”

“And I told you it was a proper moral compass.”

“It’s fucked, if we’re being technical.”

That startled a laugh from Tony. “I mean, you’re not wrong. But seriously, how are you doing?”

Strange stared at him for a long moment, calculating, and Tony stared right back.

Finally, the wizard sighed. “Not great, Stark. I don’t know how those… things… worked, but whatever could modify my insides without leaving a mark on my outside has a bit of  _ residue.” _

Tony grunted. 

“What does that mean?”

“My fantastically articulate engineer grunt?”

Strange huffed, and a smile flickered across his face before disappearing as soon as it had come. 

Tony felt strangely proud.

“Yes, that,” the wizard said.

“It means I’d probably rate enigma needles as one of the five best torture devices.”

Strange raised an eyebrow. “Best?”

“Worst, whatever. You know what I mean.”

Strange shifted a bit—orienting a sliver more toward Tony. “Yes,” he said. “I suppose I do.”

“Above or below waterboarding, do you think?” Tony wondered, tapping his fingers on his knees.

“Are you always this enthusiastic about making morbid lists?” 

Tony winked. “Absolutely. Sorting for science!”

“I rather think it’s sorting for pointless conversation.”

“That too. You’re welcome to change the subject at  _ any  _ point.”

“Says the engineer, changing the subj—subject.” Strange’s voice faltered on the last word, his breath coming out in a quiet hiss as though he was biting back a surge of pain.

“Easy,” Tony said automatically and reached out to steady the wizard. The Cloak flared up defensively, deflecting Tony’s hands, which he raised in surrender instead. “Sorry.”

“It’s alright,” Strange said—or tried too. It took the man three tries to get the words out audibly. “It’s alright. The Cloak just gets defensive, sometimes.”

“Yeah, what’s the story behind the flying cape?” Tony asked.

“It’s not a cape,” Strange said with the tone of someone who had had this particular conversation many times before. “The Cloak of Levitation is a mystical relic, sentient and powerful. It saved my life once, and we’ve been… partners ever since.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Your partner is a cape?”

“It’s not a—yes.”

“What about the grumpy librarian?” Tony wondered. “Wong?”  
Strange watched him calculatingly, as though deciding how much to tell him. Eventually, he spoke: “He’s the bookkeeper of the Sanctums—the storyteller, the protector of lore.”

“Hm.”

“The Cloak and I spend most of our time in New York. Wong bounces between the Sanctums, making sure the apprentices and Masters have what they need.” Strange shifted again, and the Cloak fluttered beneath the wizard’s hands—they were somewhat viciously scarred, Tony observed. And still trembling.

They were silent, for a moment.

“Sounds lonely,” Tony finally said.  
Strange didn’t respond. But the Cloak pulled a little closer around him, and Tony thought that was all the answer he needed.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Tony jerked back into consciousness with a sharpened sort of  _ crack,  _ awakening with a splintering of awareness instead of slowly drifting as was normal with a dream, or wrenching as was average of a nightmare. He sat up, breathing deep, but the sharpness didn’t linger. His lungs expanded easily, and Tony frowned.

“Nightmare, boss?” FRIDAY asked softly from the phone on the table beside him. The hotel was nice, astonishingly so, but even it couldn’t interface a fully functioning AI without significant renovation, so here they were.

“No…” Tony said hesitantly. “Just a weirdly vibrant dream. The kid was there, and we were in space… and there was a pincushion wizard.”

FRIDAY flickered the light of the screen—her way of laughing. “Sounds mostly normal, boss.”

Tony nodded slowly. “Yeah,” he said. “I suppose you’re right.”

But as he folded himself back beneath the thin blankets of his bed, as FRIDAY dimmed the screen again, Tony found himself buzzing with an anxious sort of energy. It was different from the festering nervousness of a nightmare, however; more agitated than fearful, like he’d been interrupted during something comfortable and right. 

Tony sat up again, swinging his legs over the side of the bed and resting his elbows on his knees. “That’s weird. That’s very weird,” he muttered. 

“What is?”

“Just this feeling. It’s… detached. Disconnected.”

“Not normal?”

Tony shook his head. “Not at all normal. It’s fading, though, so I don’t think I’m going to drop dead or anything.”

FRIDAY flickered the light again. “That would be preferable, boss.”

Tony stood, stretching in the inky darkness of the room. The motion-sensing lights faded on, comfortably dim, and Tony made his way around the screen to the kitchen tucked into the corner. He splashed a bit of cold water onto his hands, then onto his face, and the agitation in his chest loosened a bit more. 

It wasn’t a bad feeling, though. Just strange. But it was still uncomfortable, in that way the sensation of rough wood wasn’t  _ painful,  _ just unnerving. 

Tony filled a mug with lukewarm water, too distracted to make anything else, and mozied back to the bed. He sat on the end, then leaned back to swipe FRIDAY’s phone. 

“Pull up something relevant,” he said. “Anything changed with the UN in the last seven hours? Accords?”

FRIDAY searched for about two seconds. “No, boss. All’s quiet nationally—well, as much as it can be.”  
“Good.” That did mean he had to find some other stimulation for his now-awake mind, however, so he opened the news for New York for some background noise and wandered over to his luggage. 

He found himself a few blank pieces of graph paper—so what if they were somewhat crumpled?—and slipped into the plush chair aside the table. The buzz of newscast voices faded into the background as he began to sketch, aimless calculations and diagrams appearing beneath his pencil. He scribbled about nanotech, about housing the particles within arc-reactors, which could be possible with the vibranium Wakanda could provide him. Hopefully soon; he was still in the waiting list with the Outreach Center.

Which was… new. Him, on a wait list? It was humbling, exhilarating, and angering all at the same time, and Tony thought he might love it. 

There were other leaders in this changing world, and they were just as swamped as he was.

He tuned back into the quiet words of the NYC news when the word  _ dead  _ drifted into his ears, pivoting to peer at the screen.

_ Unidentified Man found Dead in Queens Coast Area.  _

Tony frowned. They didn’t usually report murders—there were, unfortunately, far too many of them in the city area. So he figured there had to be something special about this one and scooched a bit closer to the screen.

The narrator was still speaking, and FRIDAY obligingly increased the volume a bit. 

“No identification was collected from the body, so there was no way to explain the writing discovered beside it. The signs seem to be written in the dead man’s own blood, and come from an alphabet authorities have yet to identify.”

Tony’s frown deepened, his fingers tapping the table beside him. “Pause it.”

FRIDAY did, and Tony craned down to squint at the angular letters in the somewhat blurry picture. No, not letters—glyphs.  _ Runes.  _

“Run that through the Asgardian translator, will you?” Tony said. His tapping sped up considerably.

“Already on it.”

Tony stood, pacing anxiously aside the table as FRIDAY calculated. It was a stretch, but maybe,  _ maybe… _

“Translation successful,” FRIDAY said, sounding confused.

Tony swiped phone off the table, peering at the words now floating above the runes. 

_ ‘Performance issues aren’t uncommon.’ _

Every thought went out of Tony’s head.

  
  


Four minutes later, FRIDAY’s voice finally filtered into his white-hot mind. “Boss? Boss!”

Tony choked in a breath—then another, and another, forcing his lungs to contract in a slower rhythm. He flexed his hands, standing on shaky legs, and fumbled for the phone on the carpet beside him.

“Call Rhodey,” he managed. “And Vision, if you can.”

“Right away,” FRIDAY said, concern in her automated voice.

Despite the hour, Rhodey answered within moments. “Hey, Tones, what is it?”

Tony swallowed. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, voice slightly horse. “New York.”

“I’ll be there by tomorrow morning.”

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> S&T FINALLY INTERACTED BWAHAHAHA Okay it was only in a dream sequence but THEY HAD A CONVERSATION
> 
> Loki sees opportunity. Loki takes opportunity. Loki takes the Avengers spotlight and grins while he does it.


	15. No One Noticed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What? Another chapter? So soon? 
> 
> YEAH MAN LOOK AT THAT I WAS PRODUCTIVE
> 
> Enjoy!

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“Are you sssure you should be hitting the unidentified alien weapon with a hammer?” 

Peter shrugged, Loki’s form slipping slightly beneath his shirt, and continued whacking the casing of the glowing purple object before him. The clang of the hammer was sharp in his enhanced ears, but years of practice kept Peter from wincing at the noise.

Another strike, and the purple core came partially free of its cell. “Oh,” Peter said, dropping the hammer and prying at the metal with strong fingers. Loki hissed a complaint and tightened his hold around Peter’s neck and shoulder. 

“Why don’t you just turn into a bug or something?” Peter asked.

“Becaussse it’s far too easssy to kill a bug,” Loki responded, his tail flicking. Peter squirmed; the sensation was ticklish.

“Okay, a bird then!”

“You want a bird in your shirt?”  
“What?” Peter paused. “No, you’d like, fly around or something.”

Loki didn’t answer, but Peter could  _ feel  _ the incredulity oozing from the serpent. He tried not to laugh. 

The shop door swung open, and Peter looked up. Ned bustled in right before the bell rang, waving to Peter as he set his backpack down and made his way over. “Hey, thanks for bailing on me,” he said.

Peter gestured to the weapon. “Yeah, well, something came up.”

“Oh, what is that?” Ned wondered, leaning in toward the core.

Peter refrained from shrugging; Loki’d probably hiss again. “Dunno. Some guy tried to vaporize me with it.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.”

“Awesome!” Ned squeaked. 

Peter regarded him.

“Uh,” the boy hastily amended, “I mean, not awesome. Totally uncool of that guy. So scary.”

Peter rolled his eyes and went back to the casing. “Look, I think it’s a power source.”

Humming, Ned prodded the inner metal, pulling at a few wires. His eyes danced with curious excitement, and Peter moved back to let him make his deductions.

“Yeah, but it’s connected to all these microprocessors,” the boy said. He pointed to a circuit board to the left of the core. “That’s an inductive charging plate. That’s what I use to charge my toothbrush.”

Peter nodded. “Whoever’s making these weapons is obviously combining alien tech with ours.”

Loki snorted, but the sound was thankfully covered up by Ned’s delighted, “That is literally the coolest sentence anyone has ever said.”

Peter smiled.

“I just want to thank you,” Ned continued, “for letting me be part of your journey into this amazing—”

Peter smacked the hammer into the core with significantly more force, and the thing slid from its niche with a screech of metal. It’s light bathed their hands, and they quickly looked toward the shop teacher, hoping he hadn’t noticed.

But Mr. Hapgood didn’t look up, simply calling out, “Keep your fingers clear of the blades.”

Peter turned back to the glowing… thing… and narrowed his eyes. “I gotta figure out what this thing is and who makes it.”

Ned nodded. “We’ll go to the lab after class and run some tests.”

The serpent in Peter’s clothes paused, and Peter hesitated a moment. But he needed this information, and Ned could and would help him get it. 

Ned would understand. He always did.

“Let’s do it.”

  
  


They never made it to tests. 

Trotting down the hallway later that day, Ned mused to Peter, “So, it’s been a helluva week for you, then.”

_ You have no idea.  _ “Probably for you, too. Off to DC with decathlon tomorrow, right?” 

Ned nodded. “I’m a bit nervous… wish you could be coming.”

“Yeah, me too. But I’ve got stuff to do here, it’s fine.”

Another nod from his friend. “Stuff, indeed. First, I say we put the glowy thing in the mass spectrometer.”

Peter hummed. “First, we gotta come up with a better name than ‘glowy thing.’”

He shifted, pulling his backpack up over his shoulders a bit more. Loki had reluctantly agreed to stay inside it—provided the zipper was half open—so Peter didn’t have the distraction of a snake in his shirt for the moment.

Instead, he had the distraction of a snake in his backpack. 

“You’re right,” Ned said thoughtfully.

But Peter had stopped listening; there was a pair of men edging in through the doors of the school. One of them familiar.

Peter froze. “Crap!”

He threw himself sideways, ducking into the shelter of a branching hallway. Ned stared at him, befuddled. 

Beckoning frantically, Peter hissed, “come here, come on, come on, come on!”

In his usual waddling fashion, Ned bumbled over to join Peter behind the corner. 

The men conversed about nothing in hushed voices, and Peter narrowed his eyes at them. _What are you doing here?_ _  
_ “That’s one of the guys that tried to kill me,” Peter explained to Ned before the boy could ask and break their silence. 

“What?”

“Yeah, the tall, bald one.” _Mr. Loki killed the other…_  
Ned grabbed his shoulder. “We’ve gotta get out of here.”

Peter extricated himself of the other boy’s grip and shook his head. “No, no, I gotta follow them. Maybe they can lead me to the guy that dropped me and—me in the lake.”

Ned blanched. “Someone dropped you in a lake?”

“Yeah, it was not good,” Peter replied, preoccupied by the two men ducking into a classroom.

Ned’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Peter—”

In the same whisper, Peter cut him off. “No. Stay there, Ned.”

Before the other boy could reply, Peter slunk down the hallway, low and quick. He stuck to the edges, reaching the door of the shop classroom where the men had disappeared, then vaulted across the hall to slip down the stairs.

The criminals were rummaging through the half-finished projects and strewn tools, still talking.

“Can you imagine what the boss would say if he knew where we were?” said one—not the guy Peter recognized. Baldy wasn’t listening to his companion, instead swinging some sort of scanning device around the room. 

“It’s saying there was an energy pulse right here,” he said. 

Peter slipped his bag off his shoulders, ducking beneath a table in the back of the room. “Mr. Loki!” he hissed, pressing himself to the underside of the desk.

Loki had already slithered to the ground, however, his eyes fixed on the men. “Sssee them,” he replied. Quick as a whip, the snake zipped toward the men, disappearing into the shadows beneath a power saw.

“There’s no sign of the weapon, Schultz. And even if it was here, now it’s gone,” said the first man.

Baldy nodded. “So are we.”

He turned back toward the stairs, and Peter held his breath, flattening himself to the table above him. His heartbeat was deafening in his ears, as were the footsteps of the man—Schultz—as they approached his hiding place.

But it was only for a tense moment, and then the two men were padding back up the stairs. Peter extended a wrist, carefully aiming the specialty button of his web-shooter.

With a flick of his finger, a tiny robotic tracker crawled up Schultz’s pant leg. 

And as the door banged shut, Peter thought he saw the flutter of ebony wings slip through to trail the retreating criminals.

Peter smiled.

* * *

 

The setting sun shining across his lustrous feathers, Loki coasted the thermals above Queens and screeched his frustration to the wind. Nine hours—he’d followed the bumbling idiots for  _ nine hours  _ and nothing had come of it. Nothing.

The men had simply sent a few texts Loki hadn’t been able to get close enough to read, then went home. To two separate parts of town, and Loki was only one bird—he couldn’t watch both of them. On a whim, he’d chosen the unknown man, but after what felt like years, the idiot hadn’t left his run-down apartment on the edge of Brooklyn. 

So Loki had circled back, attempting to find Baldy and failing. Coasting back and forth between Brooklyn and Queens had done nothing, either—the first man was as useless as he’d been when Loki had eyes on him. 

Loki angled his wings and dropped lower to the streets. His anatomy wasn’t that of any native bird—or any bird at all—for he hadn’t decided on one when he’d shifted, and this had worked. He was black, of course, and his wings sliced through the air like a hawk despite his small, songbird size. His tail stretched long behind him—more magpie than sparrow. 

He banked, catching the gust of a passing car to turn him toward Peter’s apartment building. Hopefully the kid had a plan that  _ didn’t  _ involve Loki uselessly trailing a boring old man around New York until he accidentally found his secret lair. 

Fluttering to a stop on Peter’s open windowsill, Loki was about to shift when a distinctly  _ not Peter  _ voice called out from inside.

“Hey look at that guy!”

Loki peered into the room; Peter’s friend, the Ned kid, was pointing at him. A holographic projection of the city hovered before his other hand.

Peter, previously hanging upside down and stuffing his face with something crunchy, folded himself up to the top bunk to follow Ned’s finger. “Oh, uh,” he said, meeting Loki’s gaze and jumping down from the bed. A thousand thoughts seemed to flicker through the boy’s eyes, and Loki was content to wait for whatever he decided. 

“Did you find anything?” Peter finally asked, a bit hesitant as he watched Ned from the side of his eye. 

Loki shook his head.

Ned stared. “Dude… are you talking to the bird? Do you have a bird sidekick?”

_ Bird sidekick.  _ Loki tried not to be offended. 

“Er, no, not exactly,” Peter said. “Listen, uh… okay you have to promise not to freak out.”

“That you can talk to birds?” Ned was grinning widely. “Too late.”

“No, I can’t talk to birds—” Peter rubbed his face, then turned his gaze to Loki. “You can shift, it’s fine. I think.”

Loki regarded Ned. “Are you sure?” he chirped.

The boy’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates—wider. 

“Yeah. You can’t tell anyone about this, either, Ned. Okay?”

“Uh, uh-huh,” Ned stuttered, still gawking at Loki.

Loki sighed, then spread his wings and lept into the room. He released the magic coursing through his form and let his cells snap back into their original forms, jumping as a bird but hitting the ground as Loki. 

He straightened, rearranging his now-clean Asgardian leathers as he might preen his feathers. 

Ned let out a strangled scream, falling off the bed. The hologram fizzled out of existence as he collided with the floor, and Loki pursed his lips.

“Ned,” Peter said, “meet Loki, Prince of Asgard.”

“Hfughsnsh,” Ned managed.

“Greetings Ned, friend of Peter.” It was all Loki could do to keep from rolling his eyes.

“Dude,” the boy squeaked, fumbling blindly for Peter. “That’s… that’s Loki, that’s the guy from the battle, that’s Thor’s brother, that’s… there’s a mass murderer in your bedroom!”

Loki winced, unfortunately finding nothing to correct the boy on. “At your service.”

Peter jumped in. “He’s here to help me save the world.”

Loki whipped his gaze to the boy, brows furrowing.

“Sorry,” Peter amended. “I’m helping him save the world.”

Ned still looked considerably like a beached whale. “F-from what?”

“From an alien that isn’t here yet. He’s from the future,” Peter said. “Well, a future.”

_ “What?!” _

Loki sighed, materializing his dagger just to see Ned squirm. Peter glared at him. 

“It’s a long story,” Loki said, padding across the room. He stepped over Ned, peering down at him with distaste, before continuing to the bedside table and opening the second drawer. He pulled out the list, glancing over the names and back to Ned, then stowed it away again.

“Open up the tracker again, would you, Ned? I’ll explain while we wait.”

Loki stopped. “Tracker?”

“Yeah, I got a bug on the guys.”

“And you let me flap around New York for nine hours?”

Peter’s face fell. “Uh…”

Loki sighed, dismissing the boy’s worry with a gesture and picking his way back across the room. 

“So anyway,” Peter said, beckoning Ned. The other boy quickly brought his wrist up to project the hologram.

Loki felt Ned’s eyes on him as he perched back on his windowsill, and flicked his eyes to meet the boy’s. Ned quickly averted his own. 

Loki smirked, turning his attention back to Peter, who had launched into gesticulating explanation. It was entertaining to watch: Peter’s words, excited at some points and confused at others, and Ned’s face, becoming ever-more awestruck. 

Eventually, the fear in Ned’s eyes dissipated. Eventually, there were tentative questions, stronger when Loki responded without hostility, if without respect. Eventually, the boy was smiling, and Peter’s relief was tangible.

And eventually, Ned asked the question. “Why did you attack us?” he wondered as the tracker in the hologram left Jersey. 

Loki turned, blinking slowly. It had only been a matter of time, he supposed. Honestly, he it was a miracle Peter hadn’t asked yet. “What do you want me to tell you?” 

“The truth,” Peter answered for Ned. 

Loki looked at him, expression unwavering, for a long moment. 

And then he sighed, turning away from the boys and folding into the window. He studied the grains of the wood as he sorted through his words, through the possible answers and the possible statements. 

“I was angry and miserable and I let my guard down,” he finally said.

_ “You  _ let your guard down?” Peter blinked, confused.

Loki didn’t look up. “Usually I have wards. Usually I can tell when my thoughts are… not my own. Looking back, it was so obvious—all that hate, that spite. Before, with Odin… it was all pride, pride and ambition and  _ blindness,  _ but when Thanos found me…” 

“Wait, you were working for  _ Thanos  _ in New York?” Peter demanded, standing up. “I thought you were his enemy! I thought he  _ was  _ the enemy!”

“He is!” Loki said.  _ Odin, this is not going well.  _ “When I fell from Asgard, I arrived across the universe, in his realm. He offered me another chance, gave me a weapon; a scepter containing a power I didn’t yet know. We made a pact; I would rule Earth in exchange for the Tesseract—the Space Stone, though I did not yet know that either.” Loki shook his head. “The scepter was a Stone, as well: Mind. And I wasn’t aware, but as I had used it to control others, Thanos used it to control me.” 

The teenagers drew sharp breaths, and Loki glared at the wood of the windowsill. 

“It was subtle. So subtle I didn’t notice.  _ No one noticed.  _ The scepter amplified my hate—I had plenty of  _ that  _ at the time—and I directed the extra to fuel my desire to harm you Midgardians.”

“You wanted to hurt us already?” Ned asked quietly.

Loki nodded. “You were tools. And then ends justify the means; they always have, and they always will.”

He wasn’t looking, and didn’t see Peter shake his head in disagreement. 

“What happened in New York was an exaggeration. Of myself, of my emotions, of my convictions. But it was an exaggeration that happened, and an exaggeration that killed.”

Peter and Ned were silent, and Loki knew what they were waiting for.

So he took a long, deep breath and steeled himself, closing his eyes. His brother’s face flickered in the darkness behind them. Thor’s words in the elevator on Sakaar—accepting him,  _ understanding  _ him, or at least offering to—rang in his ears.    

“And for that, I am sorry.”

And Loki found he meant it.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *jazz hands*
> 
> Think I'll skip my YouTube outro today


	16. Before it's Too Late

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Meanwhile, in the original timeline...

**Earth-199999: September 2023**

 

Unsurprisingly, the Sanctum didn’t have any pliers. Which was probably a good thing, for Stephen wasn’t very adept with said tools anyway—and this task was frustrating enough as it was.

He was working with wire and cloth to create a cage, tied on the edges with a muddy strip of twine he’d found tying the old spoons together in the ‘silver’ware drawer in the kitchen. Using the flat of a dagger for leverage as his shaking fingers failed to grip the cage with enough strength, he forced the Stone into the hollow of the cage and sat back, blowing out a long breath. 

“Step down from the Eye, huh?” he said to the Stone, and the Cloak bobbed in affirmation. Through the unevenly cut and sewn fabric—Stephen was no longer skilled with a needle—the pulsing green light of the Time Stone seemed unimpressed.   

“I don’t know what to make of this thing, anymore,” Stephen murmured, looking to the Cloak. “I mean, I was in its  _ memories.  _ It can’t just be a weapon, just a tool…”

The Cloak gestured to itself, and Stephen shrugged.

“I don’t think it’s like you,” he said, smiling a bit. “You’ve got a far better sense of humor.”

The Cloak puffed its collar, and Stephen took a friendly fist of its fabric, nudging it with his elbow. It wrapped around his hand and yanked him up, towing him around for a moment as he pretended to fight its grip. 

“Ah!” he yelped. “And the Cloak of Levitation turns on its master!”

The Cloak somersaulted, enveloping him from the front and sending them both crashing to the hardwood floor of the library. Stephen rolled out from under it and pointed his sling-ringed finger in its direction.

“Has a demon found root in its Mystic soul?” he wondered dramatically. The Cloak raised its corners above its collar and jumped toward him.

Catching it, Stephen rolled sideways over the floor, colliding with a bookshelf. “Or has it finally spied the opportunity to enact a long-awaited plot? Does it see its destiny within its grasp?”

The Cloak paused, cocking its clasps at him. Then it shook its collar.

Stephen immediately amended, “but the Sorcerer Supreme knows the loyalty of his relic, that it would never betray him as such!”

The Cloak perked up again, pushing Stephen back as he tried to sit up. Laughing, Stephen raised his arms to protect his face as the Cloak buffeted him with its corners. The thick red fabric slapped against the bandages of his hands and forearms. Stephen surged up to wrap his arms around the excited blanket. 

The Cloak wriggled out of his grip, ducking over him and catching his head as it went. Stephen’s amused cry was muffled by cloth, and he went sprawling again, just managing to pull away from the playful grip of his relic and surging to his feet.

“Ha!” he said, spinning to face the Cloak.

It swayed like a cobra, its collars flapping, and Stephen grinned.

He conjured his mandala shields, and the energy deflected the Cloak as it came at him again. “What has become of the sorcerer’s great companion?” he narrated. “It’s unknown, but—”

His next words were cut off in a chuckle as the Cloak went for his legs and Stephen hopped up, tucking his knees to his chest. He landed on the Cloak, pinning it to the ground for a moment, before the relic surged up and he lost his balance. Falling into the folds of the Cloak with an  _ oomf,  _ Stephen tried to roll aside, but it bundled him up and towed them both into the air. 

Fighting out of the folds, Stephen blasted the Cloak back with a small surge of magic. It waved its corners at him, and Stephen shrugged, shaking his head.

“Not cheating,” he objected through his panting breaths. “You can fly!”

The Cloak waved away his words and went to fly at him again, but Stephen raised a hand. 

“Enough, sorry.”

The Cloak drooped.

Stephen ran a shaking hand over its hem. “We’ve got work to do, remember?” His other hand unconsciously touched the place behind his ear where his neck met his jaw.  

The Cloak huffed—somehow—but nodded, settling snuggly over Stephen’s shoulders.   

 They made their way back through the library, and Stephen paused to swipe the Time Stone off the table. Carefully, he slipped the awkward pendent over his head, the twine cutting into the skin of his neck uncomfortably. Stephen scratched at it.

The Stone bounced once against his chest, then settled atop the base of his sternum. It’s powerful aura felt natural, felt right, hanging there—like the Eye. Stephen sighed and tucked the thing inside his shirt. 

He made his way to his nook in the back of the library before he propelled himself into his astral form. The Cloak followed. Stephen stretched his phantom limbs and blew out a breath, glancing toward it.

“Thank you,” he said. 

He didn’t have to clarify what for. 

They sat, and Stephen lifted the Stone into his palm. “Alright then,” he huffed. “We’ve got all the time in the world. Now, what to do with it?”

The Cloak shrugged.

“We can’t go back and save Stark, we can’t go back and save anyone. We’d just save them in another, entirely different story, sticking them in a new universe—and trapping ourselves there as well.”

He looked at the Cloak, which was gesticulating something he didn’t understand. Stephen kept talking anyway.

“Time travel with the Stone is different then time travel through the quantum realm, like that the Avengers were utilizing,” he explained. “It doesn’t travel through dimensions, nor through space—it’s Time, in its purest form. So, if you go back and change something, splitting a new timeline, you and the Stone and up trapped in that new timeline, correct?”

The Cloak nodded. 

“If you attempted to go… ‘back to the future’ you’d end up in the future of that specific timeline…” he trailed off, frowning.

The Cloak flapped its corners, miming separation. Stephen blinked.

“Oh. That choice—to go forward in time—becomes a choice that determines which ultimate future that timeline ends up following,” Stephen said. “Right?”

Fluttering its affirmation, the Cloak drifted upward slightly.

“Anyway,” Stephen said. “That’s good to know. Traveling into the future is like traveling into the past—it  _ determines  _ the past. Just like I can’t change something that lead to my future by traveling into the past, once I arrive in the future, the past that got me there cannot be changed.”

A bob.

“You’re right, that doesn’t really help with our puzzle.” Stephen tapped his chin, standing on astral feet and drifting through the library. “I think it’s time to consult the ancients. Wong’s used to me breaking the wards on his forbidden books by now, anyway.”

  
  


“No, no,  _ no!”  _ Stephen snarled, hurling the astral form of yet another priceless tome at the wall. “Unhelpful!”

The Cloak flared its collars at the fallen book, backing Stephen up.

“There has to be a way.” Stephen drifted raggedly through a bookshelf, not even noticing the taste of magic in his mouth as he passed through, and ran his hands through his hair. 

But the books had nothing; the only possibility seemed to be transplanting aspects of one dimension into another. He could take the Tony Stark, the Natasha Romanoff, of one dimension and bring them into this one, but even that was an impermanent solution. The inhabitants of a universe, sentient or otherwise,  _ belonged  _ in that universe—on more than just a mental level. Their energies were designed, born, and shaped by the specific signatures of their home, and removing them would sicken their soul and Mystic potential. 

Perhaps it could work with a bonded universe—a parallel one. The individual would be uncomfortable, but not incompatible with the new dimension and timeline. But parallel dimensions were hard to come by; they had to have the same signature in Time, which was almost impossible by natural means. If there was even a slight difference in the history of that world, it’d force a wedge between the dimensions, diverging them. And then, instead of sister universes, you had unpaired, separate parts of the multiverse.  

And besides, transplanting was just plain wrong. Kidnapping someone and releasing them in a new dimension… that was not a solution. It wasn’t saving that person, it was dooming them. And it was dooming the world they came from. 

“Why…?” Stephen muttered. “There has to be a way!”

And if there wasn’t, he demanded an explanation. And he wouldn’t settle for ‘because the multiverse just works that way.’

Fuck the multiverse. Fuck this timeline, fuck the natural laws, fuck the impossibilities thrust upon him.

Fuck everything. 

The Cloak settled on his shoulders, and Stephen hardly noticed. 

“Looks like we’re on our own,” he said, watching the books with all the disapproval he could muster.

Then he craned his head to look at the Cloak. “Think you can find me some parchment? I need to draw this out.”

  
  


“Can we… merge dimensions?” Stephen wondered quietly, unknown hours later.

The Cloak looked up.

“Bring universes together. Sew them into one at the seams. Combine them and the aspects within,” Stephen elaborated. 

The Cloak mimed an explosion between its corners.

“I know it would take untold energies, but we  _ have  _ untold energies.” Stephen lifted the pendent around his neck, glowing all the brighter in the astral dimension. 

The Cloak just mimed another explosion. 

Stephen sighed, dropping in energy level so he could flop down into the physical manifestation of the chair beneath him. “I suppose you’re right,” he said. “The consequences of universes with… different Time signatures, different contents, would be unquantifiable. If, in one universe, I had a different past and six arms, what would me in the merged universe look like? Would I have four arms and all the memories? Or none of it? Or would one universe simply be eliminated by the stronger universe?”  
The Cloak shrugged. 

“I know, I know, that’s your point.” Stephen massaged his temples. 

Then he looked up.

“What if they… did have the same Time signatures? If they shared an astral dimension in parellity. Just theoretically, if two universes had the same shape in the timestream, if they were bonded through that—could you merge them?” Of course, it would just be combining two identical histories and change nothing in either universe, but could the concept be pulled off?

The Cloak was still for a long, long moment.

And then it bobbed—just once. Hesitantly.

“Theoretically,” Stephen said, and smiled.

  
  


“Strange!”

Stephen looked up sharply, gaze whipping back to the edge of the library where his physical form was tucked away. Cursing slightly, he beckoned to the Cloak and zipped toward the voice. It was conventional when conversing between sorcerers to return to one’s physical body—not that Stephen often followed conventionality—so Stephen slipped down an energy level to open his actual eyes. He found Wong staring at him, eyes locked on the circle of green light pooling at Stephen’s sternum.

Stephen held in another curse, his hand flying up to cover the amulet at his throat—too late.

“What have you done?” Wong murmured, kneeling before Stephen. There was a tremble in his voice—a  _ tremble.  _ Stephen had never heard such  _ fear  _ from the librarian before.

_ Shit. _

“Nothing,” Stephen said truthfully. 

Wong snarled, “that’s the Time Stone. It’s supposed to be in 2014—you’ve doomed a reality, Strange!”

Stephen shook his head, raising his hands. “No. Wong, listen to me; I haven’t  _ done  _ anything. Rogers brought the Stone back just the way he was supposed to, and the world ticked on, just the way it was supposed to.”

“Then how is it here? How can you  _ possibly  _ have it?”

Standing on shaky legs, Stephen shook away the breaking headache and replied, “because Thanos never destroyed it. He used it to destroy the other Stones, but it never released Time into the fabric of the universe, which allowed our timeline to be manipulated by the Avengers.”

Wong shook his head, his slight smile both fond and irate. “I see you’ve done your research.”

Stephen just nodded. “The timeline is still whole.”

“I know—I’d feel it if not. We all would; you are aware of that?”

Another nod.

“Good.” Wong extended a hand. “We should take the Stone back to Kamar-Taj. Protect it, as we have before.”

Stephen shrank back, a scarred hand catching Wong’s wrist. “Not yet,” he said. “Not… I have something to do, first.”

With the air of someone who’d known this was coming, Wong closed his eyes. “Stephen,” he said. “You have to stop this.”

“I’m almost there, Wong.”

“You aren’t, and you know it. You will never find what you’re looking for, Strange—the task you’ve embarked on is impossible. Simply impossible. He’s dead, they’re all dead, and that’s permanent.”

But it had never been permanent before. Stephen had died so many times, and here he was. Half the universe had died, and  _ here they were.  _

Nothing was impossible. 

And when you held Time in your fist, nothing was permanent.

“You need to stop,” Wong said once more. 

Stephen could only shake his head, again and again and again, rubbing the spot of neck behind his ear.

“This is  _ impossible!” _

“No!” Stephen’s words erupted with a passion he hadn’t realized had been growing. “There’s a chance, there’s a way—universes can be merged, dimensions can be combined. They can fill the gaps within the others, if their signatures in time are identical. I know that the only way to have identical signatures is to have identical timelines, but if we can find a way to bind universes with different events, then maybe—” 

Wong cut him off. “You ignore the laws of our universe—the laws of our Order! You are treading on the lines of blasphemy, Strange. Treason.”

“Stop me, then,” Stephen said, turning to face his elder, his fellow sorcerer, his friend. 

Wong met his eyes, unblinking. Stephen did not waver. 

And then Wong looked away, a sigh slumping through his form. “I’m not going to stop you, Strange. I don’t  _ want  _ to stop you. And I wish as much as you that the universe could allow this, but it simply cannot. We are specks, mere atoms, in a multiverse we cannot quantify—there is nothing you can do, nothing any of us can do, to command it. It is not in our power, and it is not our  _ place.” _

Stephen could only give the truth. “I don’t care.”

Wong put a hand on his shoulder. “I know.” 

And then he turned, stepping back into the library, leaving Stephen behind. He paused only once, in the doorway of the Sanctum, and looked back at the sorcerer in the bookshelves.

“I wish you well, Strange,” Wong said, expression unreadable. “You’re an honorable man, a good one. I hope you realize that, before it’s too late.”

And then the librarian left, the door closing behind him with barely a whisper.

When Stephen turned back to the books, to the Stone, there were tears slipping over his cheeks. 

Because that had been a farewell. 

And maybe Wong was never coming through that door again. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Cloak is the best ever. Yup yup yup. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! You know how I feel about feedback *hint hint nudge nudge* and I'll see everybody soon. :)


	17. No Big Deal

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“‘Performance issues aren’t uncommon.’” Rhodey frowned, sitting back and crossing his arms before the screen. “What sort of drivel is that?”

Tony, pacing behind him, waved his hands somewhat wildly. From the doorway, Vision drifted a bit closer and placed a calming hand on Tony’s shoulder. Tony hardly noticed.

“It’s a message,” Tony said. “It’s… that’s what I said in the Battle of New York in 2012. To Loki.”

His friend looked up abruptly. “What are you saying?”

Tony sighed, scrubbing his face with his hands. His fingernails pressed into his hairline and he knew he probably looked frazzled out of his mind—which wasn’t completely untrue. 

“I’m saying there’s Asgardian runes written in a weapons dealer’s _blood,_ spelling out specific words _I_ said to the God of Mischief when he was trying to destroy the world! Words other people see simply as ‘drivel’. I’m saying he’s back.”  
Rhodey stood, spinning the chair on its wheels and peering at the screen even closer. “Maybe you’re jumping to—”

“What else could it be?”

The other man was silent, and Tony nodded, smirking nervously.

“I believe it’s a logical jump,” Vision said from behind him. “The signs point to Loki.”

“So what do we do?” Rhodes wondered. “Can we get in touch with Thor? Can we do  _ anything?” _

Tony shrugged helplessly. “We can’t speed dial Asgard, no. ‘Operator, I’d like the God of Thunder, if you would?’ No. Thor will turn up. Maybe. Hopefully. If he ever even realizes his shape-shifting, sorcerer brother isn’t where he’s supposed to be.”

“Shit.” Rhodey blew out a breath. 

“He’s a threat large enough to warrant Avengers involvement,” Vision said, and it wasn’t really a question.

Tony nodded. “I’ve already contacted the Accords Council—we’ll get clearance. I’m going to DC later today to figure shit out, too, and hopefully they’ll realize this needs to be kept  _ quiet  _ to avoid mass panic…”

“They’re good at quiet,” Rhodey said, a bit ruefully.

Tony turned back to the image, and Vision trotted up to his shoulder; Tony rotated the screen so the android could see it better. 

“What does he want?” Tony demanded, falling back into the chair Rhodes had recently vacated. “What could he possibly be here for—why the weapons? Why the message? Why for  _ me?” _

His knee bounced involuntarily, and Tony glared at it, as though he could stop the nervously spasming muscles with the sheer force of his will. The knee kept bouncing. 

No one answered—no one had an answer. But Vision leaned in, one graceful finger tapping the screen. “You believe this connected to a… weapons deal within the city?”

“Yeah. The Spiderling told me about it—this matches what he described.”

Rhodey scoffed. “And you tracked his suit back to where it was last night and found it matched this location.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong. Tony waved a dismissive hand and stood up again, tugging at his cuffs and huffing an inhale. “Which is another problem. This… flying vulture guy suddenly got a _lot_ more dangerous. I can’t—the kid could—I’ve got Happy monitoring him as closely as he can, but I doubt it’s going to do much. He’s as stubborn as I am.”  
“Lord help us,” Rhodes muttered.

Vision frowned. “Why not invite him to assist? If this really is an otherworldly problem, Spider-Man could be of help. He knows the city.”

Shaking his head, Tony clicked out of the image and pulled up the 2012 file he’d started on Loki—now one of the biggest in the database. “No,” he muttered. “No, no, no, absolutely not.”

“Viz’s got a point, Tones.” Rhodes fidgeted a bit closer. “We could at least keep an eye on him, that way.”

Tony whirled. “Can you even hear yourself? This is  _ Loki!  _ He killed 80 people in mere hours, he brought the end of the world to our doorstep—I’m not putting him up against a  _ kid.  _ I’m not. It’s not happening, end of discussion.”

Rhodes raised his hands in surrender, making his way across the room to pull up another wheeling chair. “Alright, alright. So, what do we know?”

In the corner, FRIDAY obligingly opened a blank holoscreen, ready to record their discussion and help organize thoughts. Tony blinked—for a long time—and spun to face his companions. 

It was time to plan this shit.

* * *

 

“You are one lucky bastard, Peter Parker,” Ned hissed as they filed into the bus. Their stuffed backpacks forced them slightly apart, but the clamoring Decathlon team still managed to invade Peter’s personal space as they fought for entry into the vehicle. 

“I know,” Peter replied, slipping into the first empty bench he found. “Hey, apparently I’m just too awesome to leave behind.”

“Well, we knew  _ that,”  _ Ned laughed. “I’m just saying; consequences for your actions, much?”

“Lame.”

Shrugging out of his backpack and stuffing it beneath the bus seat, Peter sooched in toward the window. Ned sat across the center walkway to let Peter have the bench to himself; it was a mutual understanding that Peter was more comfortable with more space, and now Ned knew why. 

Peter tapped three times in quick succession against the window, trying not to look super suspicious as he did so. After a moment, the unamused face of a common raven peeked down from the roof of the bus. Peter gave it a thumbs up. 

“Is that Loki?” Ned wondered.

Peter shushed him. “What do you think?”

“Awesome.”

The bustle of the vehicle died down as the team found their seats. Peter’s gaze followed Liz as she folded herself into one of the front benches, the review packet in her arms. He was pretty sure she wrote the things herself, researching from previous national tests and folding the most difficult questions together. However she did it, it worked; they were on their way to nationals, after all.

Peter wiped the somewhat goofy grin from his face as quickly as he could, ducking behind the backrest of the seat in front of him. The bus swayed as it pulled away from the school, and the team let out a collective whoop when they began to weave through New York.

As they rolled out onto the highway, making their way down toward DC, the sounds of the city traffic quieted enough for voices to be heard through the whole bus. Liz stood up, and the chattering students immediately quieted when her voice rang through the bus.

“Ready, everyone?”

Abe pumped his fists, giving an enthusiastic affirmative that spoke for everyone. 

Or, most everyone. Michelle, in the back of the bus, didn’t look up from whichever world problem she was currently solving in her notebook. But Peter knew better than to think she wasn’t spring-loaded to answer review questions, so he didn’t hesitate to pass her a bell when they were handed down to him. 

“Here,” he said, nearly horizontal as he stretched down the row to reach her. 

“Thanks.” She didn’t look up, taking the bell with precise fingers.

Peter shrugged at Ned’s questioning look, then turned his attention to his own bell. He set it on top of the backrest before him and pulled his legs up so he was sitting on his knees; he could see the front of the bus better that way.

And so it began, the chorus of science and history trivia filling the bus with lively academic voices. And slowly, grinning as he went, Peter forgot about Loki on the roof, forgot about the suit in his backpack, and forgot about the quest before him. Even when Ned pulled up the hologram model, hidden behind the seat, Peter hardly fell an inch from his haze of interest and recall, answering question after question after question. 

For miles on a packed highway, all that mattered were the questions—and the clever, beautiful mouth saying them. 

Then his phone vibrated, and Peter jerked down to earth with a bump. 

It was Happy—which was either good or catastrophic. Palming the phone, Peter stood up, edging out of his seat. 

“Can I take this real quick?” he asked Liz as unobtrusively as he could, though he still interrupted her interview on radioactive units. “It’ll only be a second.”

“Sure,” she said, giving him that  smile that flipped his insides. 

Peter moved toward the back of the bus, balancing easily in the rocking vehicle. Trying  _ very hard  _ not to sound nervous or irritated, he answered Happy with a terse, “hello?”

“Got a blip on my screen here. You left New York?”

Peter frowned, pulling the phone away from his face.  _ Tracker. _

Then he turned back to the phone, saying, “Uh, yeah. No, it’s just a school trip. It’s, uh, it’s nothing.”

He made his way back to Ned, slumping down and crossing his feet. “Look, Happy, I gotta say, you tracking me without my permission is a complete violation of my privacy.” He uncrossed his legs and crossed them the other way. 

Ned raised an eyebrow, pointing at the hologram model.

“That’s different,” Peter said.

Happy, suspicious, demanded, “What’s different?”

Peter switched his legs again, and Ned put a hand on one of his knees to stop his fidgeting. “Nothing,” Peter said. “Look, it’s just the Academic Decathlon. It’s no big deal.”

“Hey, hey. I’ll decide if it’s no big deal,” Happy snapped, and Peter resisted the urge to hang up right then and there.

_ What the hell? _

“Sounds like it’s no big deal, but remember, I’m watching you.”

_ Oh I remember all right.  _

“Yes, Happy,” Peter sighed, letting the phone drop away from his ear. 

“He sounds cranky,” Ned observed as Peter hung up.

Scowling at the now-black screen, Peter nodded. “He can be, sometimes.”

Liz wrapped up practice a few minutes later, letting the team off to their own devices for the last half an hour before they arrived in DC. Peter flipped his bell back up to her, mouthing an apology for the call. 

_ It’s fine,  _ she mouthed back, and Peter smiled.

Peter flopped back into his seat, pulling out his phone and fumbling his headphones from his backpack. He could see the glow of the Time Stone from within its fuzzy makeshift bag, and shivered, averting his eyes and going back to the headphones. They were hopelessly tangled, and Peter scowled as he began to pull the cord into something that at least resembled a line. 

Ned interrupted him before he’d finished. “Hey, the Avengers are moving!”

Peter’s head jerked up. “What?”

“I suppose you knew that, being one and all. How are you gonna make that work, what with school and all—”

_ “What?” _

Ned’s excited face fell into confusion, and he flipped his phone over to Peter. “Tony Stark sold Avengers Tower. It’s on the news.”

And it was—the tower had changed hands nearly a week ago. Apparently Stark was relocating to a ‘new facility in upstate New York, ready for a new era of the Avengers.’

Leaving the city. 

Leaving  _ Peter. _

Peter dropped Ned’s phone like it had burned him, staring at the picture with wide eyes. “But… no that can’t be right.”

He had to clear this up—right now, right away. With movements jerky with anxiousness, Peter redialed his grumpy overseer, nearly vibrating as the rings echoed in his ears.

_ “You have reached the voicemail box of:  _ Happy Hogan.”

“Happy, it’s me. Why didn’t you—I read that you were moving. Upstate. That’s, uh, pretty far and I was just—” He took a deep breath. “I was simply wondering,” he said more slowly, forcing himself to think about each word as he spoke them, “what you were planning to work out with me.” _ And when you were going to tell me.  _ “What if something big goes down or Mr. Stark needs me or—” Another breath. “Sorry. Just let me know, okay? Thanks.”

He hung up, pulling on his curls after dropping his phone between his knees. 

“Well that sounded… not good,” Ned observed again.

“It’s a disaster!” Peter yelped. “First  _ him—”  _ he jerked his thumb at the roof where Loki’s bird form was hopefully still roosting— “and then the weapons guys and now… they’re just…  _ leaving.” _

“I thought you were an Avenger? Shouldn’t you, like, be let in on this?”

Peter nodded emphatically.  _ “I should!”  _

But Happy probably wasn’t even going to call him back. And Mr. Stark… probably hadn’t even remembered him in the first place. 

Peter set his jaw, planting himself in his seat and taking a long breath. He was more than a kid, more than a wannabe hero with a couple of gadgets and freak abilities. He’d helped people,  _ saved  _ people. 

He had potential, even if they couldn’t see it. Peter knew that, but it still hurt—the dismissals, the doubt, the ignoring, it all  _ hurt. _

Because he wanted them to see. He wanted Stark to see. Peter was strong and capable and smart and yes, he was young and yes, he had so much more to learn, but he  _ could  _ learn it. He could be someone worthy of being taught, if they would give him a chance. 

Stark had given him one—had found him and encouraged him and given him the tools to be so much more. And now… something had changed. Peter must have done something wrong, but he didn’t know what, and he certainly didn’t know how to fix it. 

He wanted Stark to tell him. He wanted Stark to  _ teach  _ him. 

And though he’d hardly admit it, even to himself, he wanted Mr. Stark to be proud of him. 

Peter never ended up untangling his headphones fully, and he was still staring out the window with storm clouds in his eyes by the time the bus pulled in to the hotel in DC. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter fought me... but I tolerate how it turned out, I guess. XD
> 
> Anyway! Tune in next time for, you guessed it, SHENANIGANS! Including but not limited to Loki messing with Ned, Peter threatening a snake with a cucumber (not literally), and a candy bar. Thanks for reading!


	18. Counterproductive to the Effect

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wait what's that...
> 
> IT'S A CHAPTER
> 
> I was in the car for like 7 hours so here we are.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

They only barely managed to keep Loki from breaking the window of the hotel, and only with a significant amount of panicked yelling. But the glass ended up unscathed despite its close proximity to Loki’s dagger, and the god ended up in the room despite logic and law. 

“What’s the status?” Loki demanded, pointing his blade at Ned, who was lounging on one of the queen beds that filled up the vast majority of the space. It was quite a nice room, in Peter’s opinion; not that he planned on spending a lot of time here. 

At the sight of the weapon, all the blood drained from Ned’s face, and Peter was quick to step between them. “Mr. Loki means the hologram tracker,” he clarified. 

“Oh, I uh, knew that,” Ned said. He flicked his wrist and the etching of light popped into the air between them, the red light flashing invitingly.

“Perfect,” said Loki, pivoting on his heel and advancing back toward the still-open window. The olive curtains wavered slightly in the breeze from outside, seeming to beckon Peter to them.

“Wait, wait, wait!” Peter extended a hand to pull him back, then thought better of it. “Shouldn’t we, I dunno, plan? Or something?”

“‘We’?” Ned said incredulously at the same moment Loki snarled, “ _ plan?” _

Peter looked between them, wringing his hands as his words began to get caught on themselves. He shifted his feet on the carpeted floor, offhandedly memorizing the way the texture felt on his bare feet. “Yeah, I mean, these guys are dangerous maybe, and uh—”

Loki cut him off. “They’re merely mortals. Do not worry yourself over me.”

“Trust me, I’m not,” Peter laughed, giving the god a thumbs-up. “I’m mostly worried for me.”

“You’re not coming,” said Loki.

Peter frowned. “W-what? Of course I am—we have to stop these guys, remember?” 

“And we are.” Loki flipped his knife. “I have a plan, however.”

“A nefarious one?” 

Loki bared his teeth in a smirk, edging toward the window. “Definitely.”

“I can help,” Peter said, and maybe it was a bit desperate, a bit vulnerable. Maybe. He didn’t want to hear what the god said next, didn’t want to hear a dismissal from him, too—

“Indeed.”

Peter paused. “But you said—”

Loki looked him up and down, green eyes flashing. “You’d likely be useful. In the fight, at least, though I intend to do a bit more than that.”

Peter hadn’t realized how tense he’d been until he started relaxing. “Oh.”

“I’ve got a good misunderstanding to start up tonight,” Loki explained, “and it’ll involve stealth. And shape shifting, in all likelihood.” 

“You aren’t just gonna…” Peter shrugged, then mimed throwing a knife.

Loki scoffed. “Despite the satisfaction that would bring me, no I am not. I am more powerful than all of these mortals put together, with a larger reputation, and that’s all I’m going to need tonight.”

“Roll a charisma check!” Ned added helpfully.

Loki turned to him, brow furrowed in confusion, and Peter chuckled. “It’s a gaming thing, don’t worry about it. But he’s right; you’re not gonna fight, you’re just gonna…”

“Intimidate.”

Peter nodded, a bit reluctantly. He had to admit that sounded like a better idea then just going in guns blazing—or… web-shooters aiming. Whatever. 

“You’d be counterproductive to the effect I am trying to give,” Loki said. “Criminal gods don’t team up with spider-children.”

Peter opened his mouth to protest, then closed it again. Disappointing, but logical—he hated that. “But—I—fine. Take the Stone with you, for one thing, and you have to let me set a tracker on you, too. Here.” Peter rummaged for his suit, lifting up one of his web shooters.

Loki rolled his eyes, but extended a wrist, letting Peter deposit the tiny robotic spider onto his cuff. They trotted over to his backpack together, and Peter carefully removed the fluffy bagged Time Stone with forefinger and thumb. The cloying aura of power made him cough, and he handed it off to Loki as quickly as he could. The god tucked it into his pocket, then turned back to him.

“If you end up fighting without me,” Peter said, stepping back, “I’m confiscating your clothing and making you wear sweatpants all the time.”

Loki hissed. Peter could almost see his ears flattening as his eyes narrowed. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I would!”

“I have been known to brutally eviscerate my allies,” Loki warned. 

“And I’ve been known to web innocents to their own belongings,” Peter retorted, aiming his wrists at Loki in demonstration. 

“I’m no innocent.”

Peter lifted his chin. “And I’d be webbing you to a wall, not your belongings.”

Loki just growled at him, took one last look at the hologram, and dove from the room. The curtains swayed lazily in his wake, and Peter resisted the urge to stick out his tongue.

“Dude,” Ned said, a bit breathlessly. “Did you just  _ threaten _ the God of Mischief?”

“With sweatpants,” Peter affirmed. 

Ned whistled. “Remind me never to make you mad.”

Peter laughed, shooting his friend a couple of finger guns. Then he spun and flopped back on his own bed, reaching for the bag he’d stuffed his suit into. “Hey, get your laptop out would you?”

“Why?”

“Well, I’ve got something I need to do before I can continue with this whole… job thing.” Peter waved an expansive hand.

Ned shrugged, pulling out his computer, and Peter pulled out his suit. He turned it inside-out, searching the base for the incision that would let him access the wiring within. Ned leaned closer, both apprehensive and awestruck.

“USB?” Peter extended a hand.

“You’re Spider-Man suit has a USB drive?”

Peter laughed. “It’s StarkTech, of course it does.”

Ned whistled again, rifling around for his cord and handing it to Peter. Connecting the suit to Ned’s laptop took only a few more minutes, and then Peter was laying it out over the bed and beginning to poke away with his pocket pliers. 

Ned, folded into a pretzel at the head of the mattress, watched code scroll by on his screen with a furrowed brow. “You want me to… hack into this and let you remove the tracker.”

“Yup,” Peter said through the flashlight in his mouth.

“Why?”

“Because I’m teamed up with a super-villain to follow a group of high-tech weapons dealers and I don’t really want Mr. Stark to know I’m doing it.”

Ned frowned. “So… we’re lying to Iron Man now.”

Peter shrugged. “It’s not like I could  _ tell  _ him about Loki, not after New York and whatever. And he doesn’t… really get what I can do yet.”

His pliers caught something thin and shimmering, and Peter grinned. “Gotcha.”

The sensation of pulling the tracker from the suit was  _ immensely  _ satisfying, and Peter stuffed it into his pocket for later disposal. Or re-purposing. He could find  _ something  _ fun to do with the fancy device.

But Ned was still watching the code, his face curling in interest. 

“There’s a ton of other subsystems in here,” Ned said, leaning into the screen. “But they’re all disabled by the… Training Wheels Protocol.” He chuckled, spinning the screen so Peter could see.

“What?” Peter hopped up on the mattress next to him, sending a ripple through the bed. Across the laptop were the words  _ ‘Training Wheels Protocol” ENTER: Stark Industries Key Identifier. _

Peter frowned. “Turn it off!”

Ned punched his shoulder. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I mean, they’re probably blocked for a reason.”

But Peter was just about done hearing about things they’d been hiding from him, about things he wasn’t  _ ready  _ for. Hissing under his breath, he shoved away from the bed. “Come on, man. I don’t need training wheels.” He stepped onto his own bed, relishing the feeling of being a bit taller before beginning to bounce slightly on the springs. “I’m sick of Mr. Stark treating me like a kid all the time. It’s not cool.”

Ned raised an eyebrow, ever the helpful observer. “But you are a kid.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “A kid who can stop a bus with his bare hands.”

“Peter, I just don’t think this is a great idea,” Ned sighed, tapping at the keys before him. “I mean, what if this is illegal? I’m literally hacking into  _ StarkTech.”  _

Peter jumped down, kneeling next to Ned to peer at the screen, then up at his friend. “Look, please. This is my chance to prove myself. I can handle it. Ned, come on.”

Ned voiced his discomfort one last time. “I really don’t think this is a good idea…”

“Guy in the chair?” Peter offered, lowering his voice.

Ned glared at him. “Don’t  _ do  _ that.”

Peter just smiled imploringly.

Sighing, Ned tapped at the keys at a speed similar to lightning, and the suit  _ flashed  _ with light as the Protocol deactivated. Peter’s eyes lit up almost as much.

“Nice,” he said, lifting the suit by its shoulders and looking it up and down. 

Then he slumped on the bed next to Ned, who closed his computer with a whisper of a snap. “Well…”

“What now?” Ned wondered.

Peter looked toward the still open window, toward the hologram beeping with two red dots now. “I suppose we… get ready for Decathlon.”

And exactly at that moment, there was a conspiratorial knock at their hotel room door. 

Peter shared a glance with Ned, and they both sprang into action as one. Diving for the hologram at the same moment Ned moved for the door, Peter stuffed the web-shooter and suit into his suitcase with as much grace as possible. He was at Ned’s side moment later, not even breathing hard.

Ned gave him the side-eye, then opened the door. “Hello?”

“Hey!” 

Peter’s stomach flipped; Liz was grinning at them from the hallway, the team spread out behind her, with a pile of candy bars clutched against her chest. In a bathing suit.

“We’re going swimming,” she said. “Everybody; the whole team.”

The student’s behind her nodded emphatically.

Peter looked to Ned, who shrugged. “What?” he said eloquently, turning back to Liz.

She met his eyes, looking a bit flustered as she smiled—probably all the stairs they’d had to climb to get to his and Ned’s room. “Yeah, um, rebellious group activity the day before competition is good for morale.”

Peter nodded; what else could he do?”

“I read about—heard about it in a TED talk. And I  _ read  _ a coaching book.” She tucked her hair behind her ear, averting her eyes as her smile grew wider.

Ned laughed, nudging Peter subtly with his elbow. “You’re the best coach ever,” he observed. 

Liz laughed, and it washed over Peter, leaving him star-struck in its wake. “Yeah. It’s our future. I’m not gonna screw it up.” Then she fumbled with the chocolate in her arms, chucking one to Peter in a smooth arc. “Besides, we raided the minibar and these candy bars were, like, eleven dollars. So get your trunks on and come on!”

Peter and Ned shared a look, and Ned shrugged. “Why not?” he said with a grin.

“Yeah,” Peter managed, his voice only slightly squeaky. “Sounds—sounds great.” 

“Great! Meet you there.”

Ned obligingly closed the door between them as Peter gazed after Liz’s retreating form, laughing under his breath. 

“What?” Peter demanded. “What?”

“Dude, you are  _ so  _ obvious.”

“What?”

Ned shook his head, waddling back to the bed and rummaging about for his suitcase. “Just get changed, dude. We already participated in a rebellious activity tonight, but I suppose another won’t hurt.”

Peter shook himself, nodding and pretending to have heard anything Ned said. “Sure.”

Ned just rolled his eyes and threw Peter’s swim shorts at him.

  
  


The water was cold, especially without any sunlight making its way in through the skylight spread through the roof, but the soft blue of the underwater lights were inviting. Peter opted to dunk himself in all at once, get the shock over with, and Ned was close behind him. 

“At least you didn’t wear your hat this time,” Peter joked.

“You’re hilarious, Peter.” Ned rolled his eyes.

Peter tucked his legs to his chest, submerging himself beneath the water. His curls drifted weightlessly around his head, and he closed his eyes, relishing the way the water suspended his form so differently from air. The magic would go away soon, it always did, but the joy of first slipping in the pool hadn’t yet dissipated. 

Peter twisted, imagining his body lengthening into something serpentine, into something draconian. Ned yelped as Peter shot past him, gathering speed beneath the water as he drew on the full strength of his enhanced muscles. 

So different from the last time he’d been underwater. 

It was light, and warmer, and Peter could taste chlorine instead of Queens water pollution and see the feet of his teammates instead of inky blackness. He shook away the cloying memory of fabric weighing him down and swam faster beneath the water, curling his legs to turn the corner of the pool. 

He surfaced with explosive energy, drawing a deep, gasping breath, and whipped his soggy hair out of his face. “Whoo!”

Ned came up next to him a few moments later, scrubbing his face with his hands and grinning. “It’s been ages since I’ve gone swimming.”

Peter nodded. “I know, right? Proper swimming.” 

He cast his gaze around the room, taking in everything, mapping the space on instinct. He saw Liz making her way along the edge of the pool, and he saw her friends slip into the hot tub on the right of the pool with laughter on their faces and excitement in their eyes. He saw Flash shoving at Abe with something that could have been a smile. He saw Michelle curled around a new novel in the corner, just a bit closer to all of them then she usually was.

Good for morale.

Grinning, Peter flipped down beneath the water, pushing himself into a handstand. The surface lapped at his ankles, and Peter shifted his weight onto his fingertips, and then just onto one. Physics was different in the fluid around him, and Peter loved it.

He swooped back up to the surface, poking Ned as he went. Ned shoved at him, splashing water into his eyes and down his throat, and Peter laughed through his coughing. 

When his vision cleared, he saw Liz looking at him.

She was perched on the edge of the pool, between it and the hot tub beside her, and she smiled just slightly when he met her eyes. And because his feet weren’t on the ground anyway, Peter smiled back.

“Go on,” Ned said quietly, nudging at him. Peter turned, a mix of panic and gratitude shining through his expression.

“But—”

“C’mon Pete.” Ned grinned. “You can do this. You got the God of Mischief to like you; I’m sure you can make it through a conversation with Liz Allen.”

“I…” Peter trailed off. 

The light of the pool was otherworldly, teal and electric blue against the walls and against her legs. Gravity didn’t matter in a swimming pool. Physics didn’t matter. The world was different when you were underwater, and maybe Peter liked it better that way.

So he turned, nodded, and ducked beneath the water again, making his way over to Liz. 

She yelped when he surfaced and pushed himself over the edge of the pool, water cascading from his arms and chest and pooling on the previously dry tile. “Oops,” Peter laughed, rolling sideways to spread the water away from her. 

“It’s fine, I was gonna end up wet anyway,” she said. 

_ What do I say what do I say what do I— _

Peter looked at the water, watching it drip down over the ledge to join the pool below, watching it lap uncaringly against the walls and against the students within it.

“You nervous about tomorrow?” he said.

Liz nodded, chuckling slightly. “Boy am I ever. We worked so hard to get here, it’s like, so impressive and important and… I don’t know, imagine what it would be like if—when!—we win.”

Peter did. He imagined slumping back in his seat and blowing out a breath, seeing  _ ‘Midtown Science and Technology’  _ flash across the podium screen before them. He imagined Ned whooping, throwing his stetson into the air. He imagined Mr. Harrington applauding, imagined the entire room applauding. Flash and Ned would applaud too, even though they were alternates, and maybe they’d finally figure out what Michelle’s smile looked like.

And Liz… she’d be speechless. She’d look around at all of them and just  _ beam,  _ and maybe she’d look at him for just a little longer, and maybe—

Peter blushed, shaking himself. “I can imagine.”

“I’m excited though,” Liz admitted. “There’s something about knowing the right answer to a question, something exhilarating.”

“Like you just caught yourself out of freefall,” Peter agreed.

She laughed, dipping her fingertips in the puddle of water beside her. “Not that I’ve ever done that, but I’m sure the analogy is perfect.”

Peter grinned, waggling his fingers. “What  _ do  _ you like to do? When you’re not managing a dozen crazy decathlon members or running student council or all that?”

Trailing wet fingers along an area of dry tile to leave long, dark streaks, Liz shrugged. “I dunno. I do like having lots of projects; right now I’m landscaping the flagstone outside our house.”

“Oh, right, I saw that at your party.”

“Before or after you disappeared?” she said, raising an eyebrow. 

Peter huffed. “Before.”

She rested a hand on his knee, and he tried not to let on how electrifying the touch was. “Don’t worry, I’m not mad or anything. I know Flash was being a dick—sorry about all that.”

Peter smiled. “It’s alright. I can take him.”

“Sure can. You’re like the smartest guy I know—Flash doesn’t stand a chance.”

“Uh, yeah,” Peter managed, curling an arm around his stomach. 

Her hand was still on his knee. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Do you ever just... write the wrong ship? Because the right ship hasn't emerged yet? And every word just huuuuuurts?
> 
> Sigh.
> 
>  
> 
> Anyway thanks for reading! Comment? Kudos? :))))


	19. Short-Circuiting

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am on a ROLE

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Loki was pissed. 

Which was unfortunate for the criminals that found him roosting like a falcon in their warehouse, lounging across the worktables as if he owned the place. Because frankly, in a few minutes, he would.

He was lingering in his raven form, unwilling to shift back into a human just yet. He’d been doing that lately. There was only so much he could blame on disguise and transport, and he was fast approaching that edge. His mother would have reprimanded him, would have told him magic was a tool, not an escape. But Frigga wasn’t here,  _ nobody  _ was here, and Loki didn’t want to feel his own skin if he didn’t have to.

So he clicked his claws against the shipping container beneath him and watched. 

Contrary to what Loki and the man of spiders had believed, the lair of the weapons dealers was not in DC. They had simply been there for the same reason as everyone else; a job, one that involved raiding an unfortunate trucker delivering his trailer of otherworldly debris to containment. Loki, jumping between forms like a flame dancing between charcoal, slipped into their spaces, into their conversations, and soon, into their plans.

_ They keep making messes, we keep getting rich. _

It didn’t take a leap of logic to put the two together. Operation alien-weaponry-meets-dumb-Midgardians was stealing energy sources, technology, and other waste and remains from the facilities attempting to keep it out of circulation. From the design of the trailer and the insignia on the sides, Loki was pretty sure said facilities were managed by a certain Stark. 

Which was actually quite convenient, when he thought ahead. 

One step at a time, though. 

It was about an hour of flying to get back to New York City, trailing the silver-and-green wings of the lead weapons dealer. Loki’s self control frayed a bit more with every flap of his ebony wings, his soul twitching to bury a knife in the man’s skull—but, well, he’d promised no killing.

And he couldn’t risk fighting, not with Peter’s threat still hanging over him like thunder.

So Loki had followed the winged man as he carried his duffel-bag of pilfered alien tech, listened to his conversation over whatever primitive mortal communications device he subscribed to, and casually constructed his own two part plan for ending the world and then saving it.

But it was cold, and raining, and Loki’d been trapped in the air for  _ hours  _ and he was starting to give up on the saving-the-world part of the plan and just settle for ending it. The weapons dealers didn’t even have a proper lair; the winged guy just started circling around an abandoned warehouse on the edge of NYC. 

Loki had rolled avian eyes, tucked his wings to his sides, and swooped down into the warehouse with hardly a blink from any one of the various inhabitants. They were lucky his desire for some cheering up didn’t overcome his honor, or at least one of them wouldn’t have seen the next day. 

As it was, Loki simply perched on one of the conveniently stacked towers of supplies and tech, and shifted back into his humanoid form without a whisper of sound. No one looked up, too involved in the weapon they were testing or the power tool they were utilizing. He stretched his pinions and then he settled down to wait.

It didn’t take long. 

The winged man swooped into the warehouse with a dramatic flare of his metallic wings, dropping the duffel bag to the ground before him. The whir of power tools and the blast of gunshots ceased, and everyone turned to their leader as he shook himself out of his suit and raised his mask.

Loki, leaning in closer, committed his face to memory.

“Success?” one of the men asked, lifting his safety classes as he stepped away from the power saw he’d been operating.

“Without a hitch, Mason,” said the flying guy. He tossed the duffel to Mason, who caught it with a huff drowned out by the clank and shuffle of the metal inside. 

“Sounds like you got what I requested,” Mason said. Loki figured he was the engineer in this scenario; useful to know. “I can have the vacuum seal up and running in half the time now, if you wanted to—”

“We’ve already discussed this, and it’s a no. Forget it,” the vulture man snapped. 

Mason sighed, but nodded and began to waddle over to Loki’s perch. Loki tensed, his knife materializing instinctively in his hand, and waited for the angle of the light to reveal his form against the containers.

“Holy  _ fuck—” _

Loki grinned, knowing he had every eye in the room, and swept his legs down to peer at the unfortunate Mason. 

The leader was at Mason’s side in moments, a purple-lit weapon pointed at Loki and a snarl across his aging face. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

Loki ran a finger over the edge of his knife. “Don’t you recognize me, Midgardians?”

They stared at him for half a moment before every weapon in the warehouse was bristling in his direction. 

“Aaaand there it is.” He smiled.

“Don’t move,” the leader hissed, doing a remarkable job hiding the tremor in his voice.

“Oh don’t worry,” Loki said dismissively, “I don’t intend to kill any more of your men.”

“Brice…” Mason murmured. Then his eyes snapped up to Loki, hardening with something angry and fearful. “That was you? You killed Brice?”

“Oh, that was the name of that oaf?” Loki swung his legs, his heel banging against the container he was sitting on in a repetitive  _ boom… boom… boom…  _ “I doubt anyone will miss him. He was rather more useful dead than alive, I feel.”

“What are you doing here.” It wasn’t a question, and Loki didn’t respond to demands.

Instead, he tossed his knife, looking around the warehouse. “What’s all this? I recognize some of it.”

The men’s hands tightened on their weapons. 

Loki laughed, low and cold. “Oh relax. I’m not here to reclaim the scraps of my army from long ago. You seem to be using them far better than I’d be. Why?”

A pause.

“... why?” asked the leader, sounding confused.

“Yes, why. What’s the goal of all this?”

“It’s our living—our business.”

Loki flipped his knife again. “So? All businesses have a purpose. What’s yours?”

There was silence as the dealers seemed to consider how much to tell him. Loki swung his foot again. 

_ Boom… boom… boom… _

“We raid shipments,” Mason finally said. “We collect otherworldly resources. We renovate them.”

“To what purpose?” 

Someone in the back called, “ _ profit!” _

Loki hummed. “Don’t lie to me. That’s not the reason—profit is convenient, yes, but it’s not the  _ reason.”  _ He leaned down, resting his elbows on his knees and locking eyes with the leader. “Why. Do. You. Do. This?”

 He didn’t even have to put any magic in the words; the vulture man simply spoke, as though he’d wanted to all along. “These weapons… the world’s changing. But it’s left the little people behind, when we’re the ones who should be, who  _ need  _ to be, changing the most. So we build, and we arm, and we’re ready to fight the next time someone like  _ you  _ comes to destroy us!”

Every weapon swung in his direction again, snarls twisting the faces of the dealers, but they failed to shoot.

Sometimes Loki loved the power in Midgardian terror. 

“And where do you get all this? Stark, I presume.” Loki had to admit Iron Man had been the only one with any sense of future or management when he’d last been to earth. 

“Yes.”

Loki grinned. “Perfect.”

“What do you want?” the leader finally demanded, his finger dancing on the trigger of his gun. Loki didn’t flinch.

“I am Loki, Prince of Asgard, God of Trickery and Mischief. I can direct attention away from you, or pull it toward you, wrapping the world around my finger as I go. I am the greatest otherworldly ‘resource’ you could ever hope to find.” He smirked. “It’s not about what I want, it’s about what  _ you  _ want.” 

“Why would you help us?” wondered Mason. 

“Because I love the scent of chaos. And because, well…”

Loki’s knife went whizzing by the leader’s ear, shearing off a sizable chunk of his hair and embedding itself in the metal plating across the room.

Loki sat back, folding his arm. “... you don’t really have a choice.”

* * *

 

“Got the glowy thing?”

Ned held it up, then tossed it to Peter, who tucked it into his pocket with his Spider-Man mask. “Check.”

“Hologram?”

Peter caught the second web-shooter when Ned hurled it at him, spinning on his heel when it touched his palm. “Check,” Ned said.

Whipping the shooter on to his forearm, Peter projected their handy light image of the city into space again, and observed the blinking red lights. Both Loki and the dealers were in New York again. “Hm,” he muttered. “Hope he found them.”

“Where’s Loki?”

“New York.” 

“Ah.”

Peter tossed the web-shooter into his backpack, closing the bag up around it from the double zippers. “Pencils?”

Ned shook his own backpack, and Peter’s enhanced ears picked up the clatter of wooden #2s. “Check.”

“Review packets?”

“That was your job.” 

Peter cursed, chucking his bag onto the bed and kneeling to try and spot the inconveniently hidden papers. 

“Did we leave them on the bus?” Ned wondered. “Or—here I’ll check the table…”

Peter, peering into the dusty underside of the bed, let out a triumphant  _ aha!  _ “Found them.”

He stretched until his fingertips grazed the papers and stuck, then retracted his arm and brought the packets with him. Along with half the dust bunnies.

“Ew.” Ned grimaced.

“Okay…” Peter blew out a breath and stuffed the review papers into the gap between the zippers of his front backpack pocket. “Check.”

“I’ve got the calculators too.”

“Great. Motivation?”

Ned grinned and made his way toward the exit of their room. “Check.”

Peter swung his backpack over his shoulder, holding the door open for his friend. “Badassery?”

“Check.”

“Confidence?”

Ned doft his stetson, wiggling his eyebrows. “Check.”

With a quiet whoop, they slipped out the door to join their classmates. “Let’s do this thing!”

Midtown Science and Tech was one of the first at the venue, so it didn’t take long to get registered and set up for the speech portion of the competition. Peter, fortunately, wasn’t performing that day; they’d found that no matter his amount of preparation, the nervous stutter couldn’t be avoided even in an academic setting. 

So Peter and Ned quizzed each other, repeatedly sharpened pencils, changed the batteries of every calculator the team possessed, and watched the time tick town with their nerves and excitement building. 

The events passed in a haze of graphite and furrowed brows, interviews and essays and multiple-choice tests falling from beneath the eager pencils of Peter and his classmates. But he’d never felt so confident, even with the weight of the glowy-thing in his jacket pocket and the suit—sans mask— winking at him from beneath the study materials in his backpack. 

So despite his mental fatigue, Peter was ready and waiting for the Super Quiz when it came. He didn’t flinch at the sounds of the live audience when he and the team navigated to their podium, sliding into their chairs next to the representatives from the rest of the US. Peter thought he could pick out every state, and swallowed the lump of nervousness in his throat. 

With ten seconds to team-answer each question, the Quiz was arguably the most difficult event in the competition. But this was their focus, what Liz had been drilling them on for months, so when the questions started ticking Midtown kept their heads up and their disagreements down and eloquently responded to quiz after quiz after quiz. 

And when the scores were tallied and the final question dying away to Peter and Michelle’s simultaneous cries of  _ “zero!”  _ Peter felt his breath catch.

He knew. 

_ “Midtown takes the championship!” _

The team erupted, diving toward him and Michelle as the applause of the room deafened everything around them. Peter laughed, but he had attention only for Liz as she threw herself at him, wrapping her arms around him in an embrace that both released and knotted the nerves in his chest. 

Michelle didn’t look at him.

“We did it!” Liz cried, such distracted, ethereal happiness in her voice.

And then she kissed him. 

Peter short-circuited. Every one of his enhanced senses was burning, seeing and feeling and tasting too much and nothing at all. He could taste her chapstick and he could hear his heartbeat in his ears and he could sense the surprise— _ his  _ surprise—in the air around them. It lasted an eternity, and Peter wasn’t sure what to think—he hadn’t expected this, he hadn’t even been brave enough to  _ dream  _ about this.

But here they were in the middle of a winning Decathlon team, and Elizabeth Allen was kissing him. 

When sense returned to both of them, she pulled away, clearing her throat awkwardly. Peter’s arms were still outstretched, and he dropped them in hurid embarrassment, pretending not to be redder than a tomato.

“Uh, well… good job,” Liz said. 

Everyone was silent. 

Peter felt Ned’s hand land on his shoulder, and was infinitely grateful to his friend for giving his dissociating spidey-senses something to focus on. He tried to look somewhere, anywhere, but could only focus on Liz’s lips—which had just been on his. 

_ Holy fuck.  _

Liz cleared her throat, spinning around to face the team. They were relaxing, the surprise of the moment wearing off a bit, so her next words didn’t feel too out of place. “You guys… we really did it. Oh! Gosh, I’m so proud to have worked with you!”

“No speeches!” Abe laughed. “We’ve already had enough of those!”

Ned—Abe’s partner for the pre-written speech event—voiced his agreement, and another round of cheering went up through the table. Everyone piled in, squishing Peter, Michelle, and Liz together as the whole team folded in for a group hug. Even Mr. Harrington, just now sprinting toward where the table had been set up, joined in.

And for a moment, Peter remembered exactly why he did what he did. Complete, undenied confidence lifted his chin and squared his shoulders, because  _ this  _ was what he fought for. This was what Spider-Man was all about—what every hero was about; preserving and allowing the simple joy of living.

But maybe…Spider-Man should participate in it sometimes, too. 

So Peter slipped his hand into his pocket, fingering the glowy-thing, and murmured, “thanks, Loki. Guess you were right about the image, after all.”

On their way out the door, ready to celebrate with the sites of DC—starting with the Washington monument—Ned slapped Peter on the shoulder and grinned.

“Congratulations, dude,” he said. “Glad to have Spider-Man.”

“Yeah,” Peter replied, unabashedly watching Liz as she lead the group like a mother hen. “Me too.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY ARG THE SHIP NEEDS TO GET A MOVE ON CUZ THIS IS PISSING ME OFF AT THIS POINT--
> 
> *Cough cough*
> 
> Anyway. Thanks for reading!!! Leave me a comment or a kudos, and I'll see you soon! Lol, I'm super inspired right now so you never know. XD Okayloveyoubye!


	20. Primary Protocol

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am UNSTOPPABLE. U N S T O P P A B L E!  
> XD enjoy this, I had so much fun with it.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“You think we should  _ what?” _

Loki watched the wingman—Toomes, he’d learned—pace irately in front of the warehouse table without a hint of expression. “I think I was quite clear.”

“That’s more than just stupid; that’s  _ suicide  _ for our operation!”

Loki shook his head. “Not with me.”

He let his fingers dance across the table, brushing against weapons and moving them just  _ slightly,  _ just so he could get a better view of their makeup, their mechanics. He curled his fingers around a stray core, similar to the one he and Peter had discovered the two nights before. 

“What do we… even  _ get  _ out of such a job?” Toomes demanded. But he didn’t step closer to Loki; none of them had come within five feet, and anything closer than ten resulted in a shiver of fear and a hasty retreat. 

“You’ve gathered quite a collection of tech, here,” Loki said. “Some of it alien, most of it from the mind of a genius. But it’s all just odds and ends, broken scraps of things that used to be so much greater.”

“So you think…”

“You sould go after those greater things,” Loki said, swinging his legs over the edge of the table. Toomes took a few steps back. 

“We don’t have the resources… the capabilities…”

Loki made a point of looking around at the weapons and half-built technologies scattered around the warehouse. “Trust me,” he said. “You do.”

“No offense,” Toomes said, “but I think that would be a bad idea.”

Loki grinned. “Going after greater things? You’ve said.”

“Trusting you.”

Shrugging, Loki stood from the table, making his way forward toward a weapon he hadn’t yet examined. The dealers parted around him like bait birds from a bilgesnipe. “You aren’t wrong,” he said.

Trailing his fingers over the gun, Loki pinpointed the muzzle and trigger and yanked it outward slightly. The gun buzzed with reddish energy, and Loki had to admit the design was somewhat impressive. They’d made this with toothbrush charges and chitauri scraps? That Mason guy was good at his job.

“Imagine a full chitauri scythe, what you could do with it. Full pick of its parts, full reign of its capabilities. Imagine instead of sub-Utlron arms,” Loki was ad-libbing now, because hell if he knew what a sub-ultron arm was, “you had the full body.”

Toomes watched him, flinching slightly as Loki’s fingers brushed the gun’s trigger. “Well, yes, we could build… anything, but—”

“Why not then?” Loki grinned. “What’s holding you back?”

Toomes raised an eyebrow. “The Avengers, for one thing.”

Loki scoffed exaggeratedly. “Ah, should have guessed.”

“And what’s your plan for  _ them?”  _ Toomes hissed. His men fidgeting nervously, their gazes flickering between Loki and their leader at lightning speed. 

“They are why you have me, of course,” Loki said.

“They beat you last time.”

Loki’s shoulders tensed, and he reminded himself where he was in the timeline.  _ “They  _ didn’t beat me, the Hulk did. With him—and the other idiots,” he added, remembering what the kid had told him about the Accords and the War, “missing in action, you have arguably little to fear.”

Toomes raised an eyebrow. “Arguably little?”

Loki shrugged. “Room for improvement. The Avengers are not to be ignored—at least until you rise to your full abilities.”

“By upping our theft game. Going after the big one.”

Loki chucked the gun back onto the pile. “Now you’re getting it.”

Toomes’s face was softening, his eyes going thoughtful, and Loki felt himself winning. 

“So, what do you suggest first?” Toomes asked.

 Loki smiled, long and dangerous. 

_ Check.  _

“Oh,” he said, running his thumb over the pommel of his knife. He let the tension in the room build, let the scent of power wrap around each and every inhabitant, let their attention pool around him and bind them to him with connections stronger than chains. And when the room was quiet enough that he could hear the water dripping into the harbor outside, when it was still enough that he could see the wind wavering stray shards of metal, Loki spoke.

“An Iron Man suit.”

* * *

 

It took a tense, long while to get through security, mostly because Peter was still on edge from Liz’s… existence, and because he’d convinced himself the overseers were going to find the suit in his backpack. But the X-Ray didn’t pick up anything suspicious, and the guys along the converobelt were actually rather relaxed about… everything. Even the glowy-thing and the Spider-Man mask in Peter’s pocket went unnoticed, and he and Ned breathed a collective sigh of relief.

He counted heads along with Mr. Harrington when they waited for the elevator and frowned when he saw one missing. “Where’s Michelle?” He leaned into Ned to ask.

“Dude, weren’t you listening? She totally one-upped Mr. Harrington with the Monument being built by slaves and not wanting to celebrate it.”

Peter nodded. “Oh. Not here, then?”

“Nah. Outside reading.”

Peter frowned, glancing back toward the door of the Monument. He and Michelle had answered the last question together; if anyone should be celebrating, it was her. Peter too, but he already had that covered. His gaze drifted to Liz, and he found her doing the same; beet red again, he looked away.

Tickets clutched in hand, the first six of them—plus guide and Mr. Harrington—crowded into an elevator, and Peter pressed himself to the far wall to make as much space as possible. Their tour guide, a short woman with a tired face and a gravely, somewhat monotone voice, launched straight into her lecture before the doors had even closed.

Peter listened with varying levels of attention as she imparted wisdom he’d never use again, his mind drifting to everything and nothing.

Okay, to one specific thing.

Peter’d never kissed anyone before, so he wasn’t sure exactly what it was supposed to feel like, what was supposed to be going through his head before and after. They didn’t make it out to be so  _ scary  _ in books and movies, so awkward and explosive. Was he supposed to be so hyperaware of himself, of her, and especially of the eyes and voices of his classmates? Was he supposed to still be wondering what they thought, what she thought, what  _ he  _ thought? 

Wasn’t it all supposed to make sense now?

Peter pulled his hand out of his pocket—it was suddenly quite warm. 

Maybe it was just because the kiss had been his first. His senses had a tendency to get overloaded, especially with things he wasn’t used to; perhaps he’d simply let himself feel and see and taste too much. Next time—he was allowed to hope for a next time, right?—he’d know what to do, how to feel. 

Peter’s whole side was starting to get warm, too. 

“The Washington Monument is 555 feet, 5 and 1/8 inches tall. Notice how the marble and granite are cut around the stone,” the tour guide was saying. 

The heat brushing against his side increased to something uncomfortable, and Peter frowned, touching the pocket of his jacket. 

And drew a sharp breath as electric, energetic pain shattered through his fingers. 

“What?” he muttered, pulling apart the edges of the pocket to peer within.  The glowy-thing was shining with a violent light, bathing his fingers in heat and purple energy.

The glowy-thing. The energy core, the  _ power source. _

Suddenly, a great many things clicked into place. 

Peter reacted.

He didn’t have time to think, he didn’t have time to choose, he just  _ moved,  _ thrusting his hand into his pocket and spinning for the wall of the elevator. His shout of warning, words he didn’t remember speaking, echoed in the tiny metal box, and people crowded away in confusion and fear.

_ “Get back!” _

Peter cupped a white-hot core in the mask against his palms, white noise in his ears, white light blinding him as he curled himself around his hands. He pressed the core against the window, pressed himself to it as though he could shield the rest of the elevator from the inevitable release of power.

The split-second before the explosion sucked everything in the elevator into utter silence. Weightless before the fall. Dark before the flicker of the light. Meeting eyes before recognition. 

_ Tick… _

_ B O O M. _

The release was deafening, and Peter heard the reverberations of alien power in his fingers, in his ribcage, in his skull. Energy shattered outward, ripping through the corner and floor of the elevator, ripping through  _ Peter.  _

His ragged scream mingled with the cry of the explosion and nobody heard.

But they all saw. They saw the purple energy crackle through the air and through his form. They saw the ugly, bubbling red of molten metal as a fissure tore through the elevator around him. They saw the weakened floor and wall fall away into the gaping emptiness of the elevator shaft beneath.

They saw him fall, too. 

_ “PETER!”  _ Ned screamed.

But Peter could hear only the ringing of the after-blast, blinking up at the retreating base of the elevator sightlessly. Everything was slipping by in slow motion, and his heart beat with heavy thuds stretching for eternity.

Freefall lifted his fingers, pulled him weightless in his descent.

Spider-Man knew freefall. This was natural, this was right; plunging down toward the base of the arc, ready to tick back up like a pendulum—there was nothing to be scared of. His bleary mind hardly registered that he didn’t have a fulcrum.

But everything was violet agony and ringing sound and Peter winced, his hands coming up to shield his face.  

There was nothing covering it.  _ That  _ was wrong; he never fell without the mask. Someone could…

…

Someone could see…

There was something in his hand, though. It wasn’t supposed to be there, it was supposed to be protecting him, covering him. The texture was smooth and the color was red, and Peter lifted his fingers to slip his head into the Spider-Man mask. 

He was unconscious before he hit the floor. 

* * *

 

The Protector awoke with a fizz of code and a crackle of light and a thousand screaming data points all clamoring for her attention. 

Her processing speed was measured in nanoseconds, however, and she’d sorted and analyzed each nugget of information before the next had come in. There wasn’t time to marvel at her new existence, her consciousness, even for the moments it would take; she had awoken to catastrophe, and it was her programming to defuse it.

The Protector took stock, surfing for injury of her charge—her database named him Mr. Peter Parker—and analyzing the dimensions of the Washington Monument simultaneously. She had 4.2 seconds until impact, and from the drag of the air rushing by her, she judged her velocity lethal.

Alright, then? What resources did she have use of?  
Her charge was not outfitted with her full capabilities, but she located the folds of her suit pressed in a containment unit against his back. She scanned her code, locating the small tuck of zeros and ones that was her capabilities for remote access. 

The Protector isolated the signature of a single web-shooter. Ticking through each of the 576 possible options, she determined the safest, most effective option, setting it as her charge’s default as her protocols dictated. 

One remote shot tore through the containment unit, and the next caught the wall 2.3 seconds before lethal impact. The Protector could not stop the connection with the scaffolded base of the elevator shaft, but she could calculate the best actions to take to cause the least harm. She lengthened the web gradually, easing into the necessary proportions to best decrease speed, but she still could not prevent all whiplash injury. Nor could she prevent the dislocation of her charge’s shoulder as the containment unit jerked with the sudden discharge of weight across the webbing. 

The code flickered through her consciousness, and then came the impact and the  _ explosion  _ of data rimmed in red as the echo of the connection filled the elevator shaft.

The Protector ran diagnostics on the body of the charge. The factors she accumulated fell easily into identifiable injuries— _ broken bleeding punctured lacerated  _ hurt.

This was not right. This was not the data she was supposed to read from the human person.

She fell back on primary protocol.

_ Protect. _

Organizing the information into an urgent, recognizable form, the Protector did the only thing she could. Call for help, to the only person she knew. 

The Builder answered her distress call immediately. She saw it received, and knew assistance was approaching.

Her charge’s breathing hitched—he was still unconscious, but his breath shuddered like a broken program and the Protector  _ felt  _ something.  

It didn’t come from order or protocol, didn’t come from some directed reaction not her own. The charge’s breath caught in blood and fluid and the Protector feared for him.

_ Come quick.  _ It was a thought. 

She didn’t have time to analyze this, the potential of her newly awakened consciousness, but she filed it away for later understanding. The code on the mask was crackling, growing ever more urgent, and the Protector found herself with nothing to do, no way to help, and it made her awareness sharpen with anxiousness. 

Something appeared before the mask’s eyes.

It was a face, female, framed in curly hair and formed of dark skin and wide eyes. The girl inhaled sharply, her expression changing—the Protector didn’t know what that meant yet.

What if this was a threat? What if this girl was the cause of her charge’s fall, of his condition? Protect protect  _ protect— _

But she could do nothing. The web-shooters were pinned beneath the charge’s body, and their discharge would not strike their attacker, anyway. The suit was unusable, the charge unconscious, and she was nothing but a string of zeros and ones within the mask.

“Wake up!” the Protector called, hearing her voice for the first time.

But the charge did not awaken.

Fingers gripped the mask, and the Protector turned her attention back to the girl before them. Her brows had furrowed, and she was biting her bottom lip—once again, the Protector did not know how to read this.

“I knew it, Peter you dumbass,” the girl said. “But you probably don’t want anyone else to know. Mask, then 911.”

“No, no,  _ wait—” _

But the Protector’s voice went unheard, and with a single yank, the mask slid off her charge’s head. Despite the situation, the Protector couldn’t fight the shutdown procedure initiated by the removal of the mask.

She called out one last time, louder, for the help of the Builder, and then she knew no more. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here comes the angst here comes the angst here comes the angst, yeaaaaaaaaaaaah here comes the angst!
> 
> That doesn't even resemble the words of the song I was thinking of but HEY WHATEVER if you've got the tune, kudos to you. XD
> 
> (Or, y'know, to me. And a comment. Yesssssss)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	21. So Still

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Needed an outside perspective for this scene, and this guy happened to be available. He flagged me down, "write me, write me!" Eh. Enjoy this one-time perspective, I guess. XD

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

When Bartholomew Mccarthy came to work that day, he expected the usual chaos of the Washington Monument. Maybe a couple of screaming toddlers in his elevator as he tried to give the tour or an excited tourist who actually listened to him for once. Maybe there be another lady with hunched shoulders and shifty eyes like there’d been the day before. And if he was lucky, he expected he might even meet someone who’d smile at him.

Instead, he got this. 

When the explosion wracked the Monument, he ducked beneath his desk as his war time instincts re-appeared suddenly. Equally as quickly, he resurfaced, diving for his megaphone. 

The people waiting outside for tickets were yelling, pointing upward toward the tip of the spire. Barley raised the megaphone, wincing at the high-pitched whine that assaulted his somewhat sensitive ears, and spoke.

That wonder of technology threw his voice out to the panicking civilians. “Everyone back away in an orderly fashion, if you would!” he called. “We are handling the—” he pulled the first description he could from his knowledge of the English language— “accident safely and efficiently. Your cooperation would be appreciated.”

Then Bartholomew dropped the megaphone like a hot potato and sprinted back into the Monument. 

He made his way through the throngs of rangers and guides all diving to try and figure out what they were supposed to  _ do  _ in the scenario of a threat like this—it sure wasn’t handled in orientation—and headed for the elevator on the side of the spire where the explosion had come from. What he’d do when he got there, Barley had no idea, but he figured it was the most logical course of action.

But someone was already kneeling in the doorway, pressing the doors of the station open with one foot and leaning into the shaft. It was a girl—probably still in high school, wearing a somewhat ugly yellow jacket and covering something in the elevator passage.

“Miss!” Barley called, skidding to a halt next to her. “What are you—oh.” 

His voice choked off as he reached her shoulder and beheld what was sprawled across the bottom of the shaft. 

There was a boy.

Wearing the same yellow jacket as the teenager beside Barley, a kid was crumpled around the winch and wire of the elevator. There was blood smeared across his face, trickling from his mouth, and his jacket was darkening against his left hip and sticking to his jeans. But what made Bartholomew’s stomach churn was the gruesome, blistering burns along his palms and fingers, stretching up his wrists in some places. 

_ Oh, God. _

“What are you just standing there for?” the girl demanded, and Barley’s gaze snapped down to her. Her curls frizzed around her face, looking just as angry as she did. “Call an ambulance, get the  _ fuck on it!” _

“Er, yes,” Barley managed, fumbling for his walkie-talkie and then for his cell. 

When the medics—EMTs, he reminded himself, had been notified and the rest of the rangers were aware of their situation, Barley finally got his explanation. Apparently, there’d been an explosion in one of the elevators (Barley was pretty sure he knew which one), the inhabitants unharmed because of the actions of the one he was now looking at. The rangers had managed to free the rest of the students, as the damage had been directed to a specific point on the elevator, so less structural damage had been sustained.

Instead, there’d been human damage. 

God, he was just a  _ child… _

“Help’s on the way,” he said, kneeling next to the girl.

“Good.”

“What’s your name?” Bartholomew asked. He wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed, but a name couldn’t hurt. 

“Michelle.” The girl’s voice was hard and almost cold. “I’m with Midtown Science and Tech… are they alright?”

“The rest of the students are fine, I’m happy to say. They say…” Barley’s gaze drifted back to the unconscious boy before him. “Well, they say he kept the explosion contained so your classmates could make it to safety.”

“Of course he did.” Michelle snorted. “Of course you fucking did, Peter.”

Barley looked back at the boy, fighting the urge to reach out and move him so the curl of his body wasn’t so awkward, so the angle of his shoulder wasn’t so wrong, so the blood didn’t stick his clothes to his form so uncomfortably. Those burns… had he  _ held  _ the bomb?

Barley started listening for sirens. 

It didn’t take long, thank God, but there was still blood beading on the beams of the shaft when the men in their ivory jackets took the boy away. Michelle stood to follow, and Barley inched forward slightly, trying to see the body on the stretcher within the throng of people. An EMT stopped the girl, but Barley slipped out the doors and towards the sound of sirens. 

He trailed the group, trying to look ready to help with anything that needed doing—or look like he belonged there. Barley was able to keep a few curious civilians from crowding too close, which he figured justified his continued advance after the injured boy. 

So he was the unlucky human almost crushed by a rapidly descending projectile as it slammed into the concrete plateau at forces that crackled through the area. 

Bartholomew would later deny that he screamed. Nobody heard, anyway, as the echo of the connection rang into silence. The EMTs froze, the civilians paused; the whole world seemed to stop in fearful surprise.

And then the projectile straightened up.

Barley’s mouth fell open. 

Was that—it was. Iron Man, goddamn  _ Iron Man, _ stood a foot in front of him, suit shining in all its silver, gold, and ruby glory. 

Barley made a sound that sounded a bit like a dying parrot. The suit turned its narrowed eyes to him, and Barley stared in turn, resisting the urge to back away or (equally strong) drop into a bow. 

As though deeming him nonthreatening, the suit suddenly cracked open, peeling away from the man inside it with smooth, concise movements. Bartholomew thought it looked like the time-lapse of a flower opening he’d watched once, except this flower was made of metal and opened to reveal a distinctly determined Tony Stark.

Barley had seen that expression before, on men in doorways of med tents. And so he raised a hand and simply pointed. “There,” he said.

Stark spun, and Barley peered after him, trying to identify what seemed so… off about the man. Well, besides the fact that he was striding in flesh and blood through the air right in front of Barley.

“Move!” 

Stark’s curt voice cut through the haze of shock, and it all shattered at once. People’s voices clamored back up, the screeching of walkie-talkies made Barley grit his teeth, and the sirens seemed even louder. One of the EMTs opened her mouth as the billionaire approached.

“Sir, what are you—”

Stark didn’t stop walking, and the EMTs were forced to step aside or be trampled by his unstoppable gait. The yawning back of the ambulance wobbled slightly as he stepped inside it, and Barley scuttled forward a bit to try and see what was going on.

The man was leaning over the stretcher, shoulders taunt, eyes flickering across the body of the boy curled atop it. His face was so still it could have been carved from stone, but his hands were trembling, just slightly, as they brushed the edge of the stretcher. 

_ That’s it _ , Barley thought. Stark was tense, and Barley didn’t think he’d ever seen that before; this was different from the Iron Man one saw on the media. 

“What happened,” Stark said, and it was more order than question.

No one answered, the EMTs sharing glances. They hadn’t had time to ask questions about that, yet, and the woman from before spoke up again. “He’s stable, but we don’t know—”

To his complete shock, Bartholomew found himself opening his mouth. “He fell down an elevator shaft,” he said.

Stark’s gaze snapped to him, intense and vigilant. “What?”

“There was an explosion. He—” Barley indicated the unconscious boy— “contained it, somehow, kept the rest of the elevator safe.”

Stark looked back down, raising a thumb to wipe away a spear of blood on the boy’s lip.

“How the hell’s he stable?” wondered one of the EMTs.

“None of your concern,” was Tony Stark’s curt reply, though they hadn’t been speaking to him. “He’s coming with me.”

“Absolutely not,” said the woman from before, and Barley felt a sudden surge of respect for her. He would have cowered into nothingness from the force of Tony Stark’s glare, but she stood her ground, keeping a hand on the stretcher. “Without connection to this boy—”

“His name is Peter Parker,” Stark stated, and if Barley didn’t know better he would have called his tone a hiss. “And I’m going to get on the phone with his aunt just as soon as you chart course for New York City.”

“The nearest hospital—”

“He’s a resident of Queens. He’s also in stable conditions, and will be cared for in my facility upon arrival in the state.”

“You don’t have the authority to—”

Another shrill voice cut through the air, and the civilians, EMTs, Barley, and Tony Stark all swung their attention to the door of the Washington Monument as another boy—again, clad in a yellow jacket—came waddling across the plateau at full speed. He was pursued by about six rangers, who’d long since given up on ordering him to stop, and though his chest was heaving his voice was strong and loud. 

_ “Peter!” _

Stark turned, surveying the running kid as he gained ground toward the ambulance, but his hand never left the edge of the stretcher.

“Peter,” the kid cried again, clutching his stomach with one hand when he stopped before the ring of EMTs. His eyes found Stark, then drifted down to the boy—Peter—on the stretcher and went wide.

A flicker of recognition passed through Stark’s eyes, and he exited the ambulance in one swift motion, shoving through the poor paramedics again. They spread out around the ambulance, two slipping toward the cab and the others climbing in around the injured child.   

“Hey,” Stark said, his voice surprisingly soft as he approached the new arrival. Barley edged a bit closer to the ambulance, not exactly sure how to proceed. 

“Mr…. Mr. Stark,” the boy coughed out, still breathing hard. “Is Peter—He looked scared and then he told us to get back and then there was an explosion and he fell and is he okay, please he has to be okay—”

“He’s okay.” Stark held up a hand to silence the boy’s ramble. “You are…?”

“Ned,” the boy said. “Ned Leeds, I’m… Peter’s best friend.” After a moment, Ned added. “I know.”

Then he folded his fingers into something that looked a bit like the ASL symbol for “I love you” and Barley’s confusion amped up three notches.

Something that could have been surprise etched itself across Stark’s face, and then disappeared as soon as it had come. “Right,” he said, stepping back a bit. “Well, Mr. Leeds, these  _ wonderfully cooperative  _ individuals have assured me that Mr. Parker is perfectly stable. He’ll be recovering in my own facility, and should be back with you before you know it.” A little more softly, Stark added, “he’s a fast healer.”

“Right. Can I… can I see him?” Ned craned up on the balls of his feet, trying to see the stretcher through Stark and the EMTs.

“I think you’re needed inside,” was Stark’s reply. 

Ned shook his head frantically. “But he’s— I need— he can’t— I need to see him, you don’t understand, he was  _ screaming  _ and it sounded like… I don’t know, it must have  _ hurt  _ so badly and I couldn’t do anything—”

“He’s unconscious now.” Stark cut the boy off. “Healing. I don’t think even he could manage to hurt himself in his sleep.”

“But what if he—”

“Mr. Leeds.”

The boy quieted, wiping a stray tear from his cheek as he looked up at Stark.

“I’ll take care of him, alright? I promise.”

Slowly, Ned nodded. 

Barley could safely say he had no fucking clue what was going on anymore. And that only increased when Stark sighed, reaching into his pocket and coming back with a crumpled receipt and a pen.

“Here,” the billionaire began, scribbling something and handing it to the boy. “If anything like this happens again, you let me know.”

Ned stared at the fluttering bit of paper, at Stark, and then back at the piece of paper. “Um, yeah,” he finally breathed. “Yes, sir. I will.”

“Good. Don’t make me regret that, Mr. Leeds.” 

And with that, Tony Stark spun on his heel and stalked back into the trailer of the ambulance. The doors slammed on his voice as he went back to arguing with the lead EMT, and Barley took a shocked step back.

“Holy hell,” he said eloquently. 

That had been… rather different than what he expected from the workday.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the park rangers are so confused lol. Also the EMTs. All the poor emergency reactors in these movies, I wonder what's going through their heads. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! This one was astonishingly enjoyable. Hope you liked!


	22. That Simple

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just hear me out?

 

**Earth-199999: September 2023**

 

“You know what would be really convenient?” Stephen sighed, his hands in his pockets and the Cloak around his shoulders. The two of them made their way around the perimeter of the tiny park near the Sanctum; two straight weeks inside a stuffy building did things to one’s health and motivation. “If the Encyclopedia Britannica had a nice, to-the-point entry on ‘dimension binding’. Would really make my day, that would.”

The Cloak flapped at his cheek, and Stephen was thankful the park was mostly abandoned. 

“We can’t go through the list  _ again,”  _ Stephen sighed. “It hasn’t helped in the past week, and it’s so depressingly short I feel like giving up every time you mention it. ”

The Cloak shrugged—while draped across Stephen the movement felt decidedly weird.  

“Fine, okay. We have the ability to split timelines via Time Stone travel. We have a vague idea that combining dimensions might just be what we need, though those dimensions would have to share astral planes to have any  _ hope  _ of merging—meaning they need to be parallel. So we need a way to artificially pair dimensions, because parallel timelines are identical and that would be unhelpful. Merging two identical universe doesn’t change anything; there’s no seed for variance in either universe. He’s dead in this one, he’s dead in this one, you bet your nonexistent head he’ll be dead in the combined one.”

The Cloak fluttered, and Stephen found himself tugged off the sidewalk and into the grass of the park. 

“Stop, I’m trying to walk,” Stephen snapped. 

The Cloak smacked him.

“Hey! Fine, I’m sorry, that was uncalled for.”

Forcing Stephen’s arm to his side, the Cloak crossed its corners. Stephen rolled his eyes and wriggled within the grip, but his relic didn’t release him.

“This isn’t a therapy session, I’m just trying to go for a walk,” he said, rubbing the place behind his ear where his neck met his jaw.  

The Cloak pulled him back when he tried to start moving again, pinning him in place.

Stephen growled. “What do you want me to say? I’m a grumpy, tired sorcerer with a social life bordering on hermit and a focus bordering on obsession. I thought we were both perfectly aware of this.”

The Cloak grabbed one of his wrists and floated out in front of him, looking him up and down.

“Can you stop that?” Stephen hissed. “We’re in a public location.”

His garment lifted a corner and pressed it to his mouth. Stephen spat out the fabric, trying to keep himself from being smothered, and said, “I’m only talking because you asked. Can we go now?”

But the Cloak didn’t release him, instead stroking his wrist and then repeating its gesture. Stephen humored it, not saying anything. But it shook its collar, and Stephen figured he’d misinterpreted what it intended.

“What?” he said. “I don’t understand.”

It poked his stomach, then covered his mouth again.

“What—oh. I ate this morning, remember? I had the rest of the saltines.”

The Cloak hadn’t left his side for the weeks they’d been searching for answers, never drifting through the door-portals (the doortals) back to Kamar-Taj as it had done before… everything. Stephen didn’t know what it had done there, or what it did now, really, but he was glad for its warmth. He was glad for just the flashes of movement it provided in the silent Sanctum sometimes. 

Stephen hadn’t thanked it. 

He should.

The Cloak tightened its grip on his wrist, looking unimpressed.

“There’s yogurt or something still in the fridge, I think,” Stephen said, a veiled threat in his voice. He made a point to open yogurt cups in specific directions, for they had a tendency to increase in pressure around his magical residue and explode when he cracked them open. 

The Cloak didn’t look perturbed, and gestured pointedly to the city around them. 

“I don’t have any cash for food.”

It gestured again. 

“Conjuring money is against the Order’s laws.”

Stephen assumed the next flare of hem and collar meant  _ so is you starving to death, you idiot warlock.  _

“I’m not going to starve to death. We have yogurt. And saltines, apparently.”

The Cloak squeezed his wrist tighter, crossing its other corner over its chest-area. Stephen pulled at the grip experimentally, but there wasn’t even a ripple of reaction in the fabric, and he knew from experience that the Cloak would hold him here forever if necessary.

“Fine,” he hissed, hating the defeat, even if it was friendly. “I’ll get a sandwich—”

_ I wouldn’t say no to a tuna melt. _

On second thought, he had no appetite for sandwiches. “I’ll get a burrito or something. But you have to let me eat it in the library.”

The Cloak released him, and Stephen took that for agreement. 

  
  


It took another month, but Stephen finally had to let go of the miracle spell he’d been looking for.

“Magic won’t do it,” he sighed, letting the book fall abandoned to the floor of the library with a thump. “It’s on too big a scale. Even channeling the Stone’s power, there’s no way to channel the Mystic Arts around universes. It’s simply…” He dropped his chin to his chest in resignation. “It’s simply impossible.”

The Cloak wrapped around his head, patting him comfortingly.

“Not that I’m giving up,” Stephen said, narrowing his eyes and pointing up at the Cloak. “I just have to find another angle, that’s all.”

The Cloak dropped a hem, a little like a snake extending its neck, and lifted the makeshift Eye around Stephen’s neck. Stephen mirrored it, cupping his shaking fingers around the amulet as well.

“This is our master tool, I suppose,” he said. 

The Cloak unwound itself and came to drift beside him. Shaking out his wrists, Stephen reached for the water-bottle on the table in front of him and took a sip of the somewhat lukewarm tea it contained. He managed not to spill it across his tunic, this time, and the Cloak gave him its rendition of a thumbs-up.

“It’s got the energy of this dimension, correct?” Stephen mused. “The Stone is a fundamental aspect of our universe. Elemental crystals of our reality, blah blah blah.”

The Cloak bobbed in affirmation, folded itself into a cube, and settled on Stephen’s lap. The sorcerer stroked it between the edges of its collars, which poked up like cat’s ears.

“But if we use it to change the past… that would shove it into a world not its own, correct?” He didn’t wait for the Cloak’s answer. “Maybe the Stone would… I don’t know, behave differently in another dimension.”

He paused. “Shit, would it lose its power?”

The Cloak shrugged, and the movement tickled Stephen’s wrists and made him squirm. 

“We should test it,” he said. “How; still working on that.” 

Pushing himself into his astral form, Stephen skirted through the library again. Finding a test dimension was fairly easy, but measuring the effects on the Stone would cause difficulty. 

When he popped back into his physical body, the Cloak turned a lazily to look up at him. 

Stephen waved sarcastically, then said, “so what if we just pop over to Kobar and see what happens? The monarch on Planet Kia—Erzen? Yeah, that’s it. Anyway, ve likes me after the incident with the worm thing, and would probably be fine with it.”

Ezren was the first ruler of Kia of the vemale gender, and creatures had come from all across the galaxy to test vis strength. But the ‘testing’ had started to border on violent sexism at one point, and Stephen had happened to be in the area. So now he had an easy token to pass into that dimension and an ally that might be just what they needed.

The Cloak shot around him, flapping excitedly, and Stephen chuckled. “I’ll take that as a yes then, shall I?”

**Netherworld Kobar:** **_September 2023_ **

Stephen, his feet bare on the silver grass, held the Time Stone in his palm and frowned. 

“It feels… rather the same,” he said, glancing down at the Cloak around his shoulders. “The Stone does, at least. I feel a bit weird, but I haven’t been out-of-universe lately, so that could be why everything’s… wrong.”

He looked back at the Stone, quietly pulsing in his palm, and his frown deepened. “Ez is gonna be disappointed that I didn’t destabilize the universe. Ve likes chaos, apparently.”

The Cloak fluttered. 

“I _do_ _not_ ,” Stephen muttered in response. “I’d rather avoid chaos, thank you very much.” He tossed the awkwardly constructed amulet, feeling it thud against his palm, and glanced around him for inspiration on… anything. What the hell should he do now?

The Kian grass was soft beneath the pads of his feet, and Stephen thought he understood why they found it sacred. Breaking the connection between one’s feet and the vegetation was more than just disrespectful to the Kian people; it was a felony of the highest order. Ezren was having rather the same debate about the death penalty as Earth was, actually, but it was better to just lose the shoes and get on with it.

“Shall I just… channel the Stone, then?” 

The Cloak shrugged, and Stephen figured it was as good a place to start as any. He let his eyes flicker closed and extended his perception to the flame about his neck, rubbing up against it somewhat hesitantly.

The power of the Time Stone leapt at his touch, as eager and unstoppable as ever. The change in dimensional location didn’t seem to bother it, and Stephen frowned.

“I guess it makes sense,” he said, and the words were wreathed in green and tasted of cinnamon and onyx. “It’s power comes from itself, not the universe.” But he hadn’t truly used it yet, and that was where the real test lay.  

He wrapped his awareness around the well of energy within the Stone and ordered it into corporation with a somewhat hesitant whisper. 

And found himself spinning out of his body.

His astral form splintered through the wall of the dimension and fell to its knees, the feeling of  _ wrongness  _ multiplying exponentially. “Oh,  _ fuck—”  _ Stephen managed, then fought back to his feet and glanced around. 

The astral plane looked… strange. More than strange; it looked wrong. He could see his body, eyes wide in shock and the Stone glowing in his chest, but the ground beneath was a bit… fuzzy. Almost as if there was something else there, besides the grass, warring for dominance in the cooperation of the dimension.

That wasn’t right. The astral plane was a constant tier of space-time; the same energy signature across the entirety of the multiverse. It didn’t matter which dimension you entered it from; it should simply mirror your surroundings as your soul vibrated to a higher frequency in that same planar location. You only shifted one factor of your coordinates on the 4D axes of the multiverse, changing  _ form,  _ not  _ location.  _

But this… this definitely wasn’t purely tapping into the astral realm from Kobar. 

“What…” he muttered, testing his voice. It sounded clouded, like in his usual astral form, and Stephen’s confusion deepend. 

And then, on instinct, he closed one eye.

It was more of a symbol than an actual action; Stephen blocked out half his awareness. And suddenly, the astral plane sharpened around him, the Kodar landscape turning fully astral.

_ Okay, that’s weird. That’s very weird. _

Almost scared of what he’d see, Stephen blocked out the other half, swapping his wink. 

And he saw the Sanctum. 

The grass beneath his astral feet suddenly became the worn wooden slats of the library, the light of the three suns became the lamps and the windows, and the shrub-like vegetation around him became his chair and table. The chair and table he’d been at when he’d stepped into this dimension—the corresponding location across the multiverse.

_ Oh. _

Slamming back into his physical form with a cry, Stephen dropped the Stone like it had burned him. He pulled his magic away from it, extricating himself from his power, and through his shock a butterfly crawled from between his lips. The Cloak tightened its hold around his shoulders and lifted a corner to cup his chin.

Stephen brushed away the hold, needing to look at it. Then he gripped the amulet and held it up between them as he searched frantically for words.

“It can’t be that simple,” he murmured, fingers brushing the spot of neck behind his ear. “Is it that simple?”

The Cloak cocked its collar, bobbing in confusion. 

Stephen looked up at it, then raised his sling-ring and drew on the power of home. He swallowed the hope blooming in his chest on the chance that it would be shattered and gestured toward the portal.

The Cloak’s collar skewed ever further.

Stephen reminded himself that even ancient Mystic relics couldn’t read his mind, trying to keep from getting irrationally irritated as he explained. “I need you to go back to the Sanctum, then jump energy levels into your astral form.”

The Cloak didn’t move.

“Just trust me,” Stephen said, shoving it through the portal and spinning back to the horizon of Kobar. 

The portal snapped shut behind the Cloak, and Stephen turned his attention to the Stone again. With a precision that would have made Wong proud, he drew on its energy and cast the first spell that came to mind.

But instead of conjuring his mandala shields, Stephen found himself blinking into existence in the not-astral plane again. The double-realm pushed uncomfortably on his Mystic perception, but it wasn’t the same Wrongness that he’d felt purely in Kobar. 

Breathing through the churning in his gut, Stephen closed one eye again.

The Sanctum fizzled into view around him, and Stephen began to turn.

He wouldn’t have believed it if he wasn’t seeing it, but this could be a shared astral plane. This fuzzy, dual-dimension was the result of the Time Stone, the result of using it in a universe its energy didn’t belong to. And perhaps that energy knew where it belonged,  _ pulling  _ Stephen and Kobar  into the vibration of his Earth world and letting two dimensions, previously unconnected, slide against each other in the multiverse.

Quite simply, it meant the Time Stone wanted to go home. And it was willing to bind dimensions— _ force  _ them into parellity—to do so.

If it was that simple. Oh, fuck,  _ let it be that simple.  _

When Stephen faced the library, the Cloak’s astral form blinked back at him. Slowly, hesitantly, hopefully, it drifted toward him—and wrapped snugly around his shoulders.  

Stephen stared at the phantom image of the two of them, sorcerer and relic, standing in the Sanctum with their bodies in two different realms. Two realms, now parallel, just by the simple existence of an Infinity Stone that didn’t belong in one of them.

It was that simple.

And loud and joyous and finally, finally true _ ,  _ Stephen Strange threw back his head and  _ laughed _ . 

“Now we’re getting somewhere.”

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize for the general suckiness of this chapter. It's bad. I don't know how to execute it better though... Eh. Hopefully you made it through!
> 
> Basically Stephen figured out that the Time Stone belongs in his dimension, and that if you stick it in another dimension it really really just wants to get back to his dimension, enough that it forces the two dimensions to have identical time signatures, parallel time-streams, and by extension, a shared Astral plane. Which you can access from the "wrong" dimension by using the Time Stone. 
> 
> Okay thanks for putting up with this! See you soon. :)


	23. Gave us all a Scare

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was fun. Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Loki spent thirty-eight hours waiting for Peter.

The first twelve were spent asleep in the boy’s room from about two the morning after they’d gone to DC to two that afternoon. He assumed that the team wouldn’t be coming back until after the competition, and wasn’t surprised that no one had returned while he was dozing. 

He spent the next two hours entertaining himself with the list and the Time Stone, brainstorming and planning and rehearsing how he was going to explain the latest developments to the man of spiders. 

But Peter didn’t return that afternoon. 

He didn’t return that evening, either. 

Loki convinced himself it was alright. That maybe he’d gotten the times wrong, the days confused. Perhaps his team was returning the day  _ after _ the competition, sleeping in DC one more night. But as the night stretched, Loki realized the weekday. It was Saturday. 

Loki’s boredom became unease. 

He left the building the next day, skirting through Queens in various forms as he checked in on the musings of Toomes and his team. Scaring them a bit, he appeared and disappeared throughout the day and kept them on their toes, beneath his thumb. He wandered around as an ebony rat, got into a couple of catfights, and all together avoided human form. 

It was late afternoon when Loki slipped back into Peter’s room.  _ Very  _ late—there was no excuse the kid wouldn’t have gotten back from DC yet.

“Spider-child,” Loki hissed, peering into the room.

Nothing answered.

The boy’s luggage wasn’t here, either; Loki hadn’t missed him as he went out to patrol. He wasn’t… where in Helheim  _ was he— _

“While you were participating in your idiotic competition, I saved the world. Would you like me to catch you up?”

Nothing. No chuckle, no huff, no indignant snort. 

Loki’s unease turned to anxiousness.

“Peter!” he called, a little louder. But the apartment was empty of the entire Parker family, and Loki found himself strangling his wrist as he stalked through the small area.

He threw open the door to Peter’s room, his gait becoming a run as he surveyed the area. The front door, down to the staircase that would lead to the street, was locked. There were no shoes beneath the coat rack, and the dishes in the sink were dirty as Loki stumbled through the apartment. 

The kitchen smelled terrible, and Loki found it was because of the cream-cheese left out and curdling on the counter.

No one was here. No one had been here.

_ Fuck.  _

Loki’s anxiousness turned to a bone-deep, corroding sense of dread.

And he stopped waiting and started  _ looking. _

  
  


That night, there were perhaps more screams in the New York underground then there might have been before. But despite everything, nobody knew where a bright-eyed boy with curly, chestnut hair had gone. 

By the end, they wished they had. 

  
  


Ned Leeds yelped when Loki cornered him in the school bathroom on Monday and turned from snake to god in a single whip-quick movement.

“Loki, what the—”

There was a knife at the boy’s throat before he could continue. “Where isss he?” There was a hiss in Loki’s voice, despite his humanoid form.

Only a terrified squeak escaped Ned’s lips, white with terror.

The knife bit deeper, blood beading on the boy’s collar-bone. “What did you do with him?” Loki’s face was a snarl of fury but his mind was static, a constant ramble of  _ gone gone gone gone gone. _

“Peter—I didn’t do anything—” Ned was cross-eyed looking at the knife. 

_ “Where is he?” _

“I’ll explain! Just—dear fucking god, get the knife away from my neck!”

Slowly, making sure Ned knew he was ready to strike again at a moment’s notice, Loki retracted his arm. Leeds straightened, gulping in huge inhales as he rubbed at his collar-bone.

“Do you always lead conversations like that?” the boy asked, his voice still wobbling with fear. 

Loki glowered. 

“Sorry, sorry,” Ned squeaked. “Getting to the point. There was… you remember the glowy-thing?”

Loki nodded slowly. 

“Well, after we brought it into the Washington Monument… something happened.” Ned swallowed. “It exploded. Big burst of energy, shattering through the elevator… Peter was holding it, at the time. And he fell… 45 stories.”

A cry echoed through the bathroom, a single syllable, short and clipped and mournful.

Loki realized through the ringing in his ears that it had been him.

“Shit—he’s okay though!” Ned said hastily, his hands vibrating at his sides. “He was hurt bad, but Mr. Stark showed up and took him to his compound. Peter has quick healing or something because of the spider thing, so, uh, Mr. Loki, are you…”

Loki was fighting for breath, trying to recover from the emotional whiplash of despair to unimaginable relief without sobbing in front of this Midgardian. He was the  _ fucking God of Mischief;  _ crying over human teenagers was unacceptable. Especially where other human teenagers could witness it.  __

“You said Stark took him?” Loki managed, his voice slightly hoarse.

“Uh, yeah, uh—”  
Loki’s shifted form was darting out of the bathroom before Ned had even drawn his next breath.

* * *

 

**Dreamscape-200004, Adjacent Astral Plane:** **_August 2023_ **

In Peter’s opinion, if he was going to be yanked back from the dead five years in the future, there should be at least a _little bit_ of mental or physical effect. He’d practically been pushed out of the timeline and just as abruptly shoved back in; wasn’t there supposed to be _some_ strange feeling or unusual afterimage?  
As it was, Peter was more disoriented by the _lack_ of disorientation than by anything else. Or, he had been. Now he was rather more disoriented by the fucking explosions and the falling sky. He could deal with aliens and weapons and wizards; but the sky falling in a flurry of detonations and shrapnel? All Peter could do was clutch the gauntlet to his body and crawl beneath the nearest rock, praying to any of the numerous gods he was fighting beside that everyone was okay.

And then his rock exploded, and everything got a bit more complicated. 

Peter could see the monster of a ship looming above him. He could see the missile, clutched within the swiveling mouths of their cannons, bearing down on the battlefield. Bearing down on  _ him _ .

He would have liked to see Aunt May, he thought vaguely. Hug her and feel her ruffle his hair one more time. And Ned—apparently it had been  _ five years  _ since he’d gone through his handshake with his friend. He would  _ really like  _ the coming explosion not to turn him to dust  _ again.  _

At least he’d gotten to hug Mr. Stark. That had been nice. Rather more than nice—he’d felt safe, just for a moment, despite the blood and the noise and the battle. Like everything was going to be alright.

Maybe everything would still be alright. But his ears were ringing and there was blood in his eyes and in his mouth and the death-ship just kept  _ shooting  _ and Peter was starting to doubt it.

The gauntlet in his arms was cold and metallic and it stuck to the nanotech of Peter’s suit. One of his spider legs had been ripped away, devoured by an alien or blasted off by one of the missiles. He’d used the nanotech of his helmet to regrow it and crawl further away, to find shelter.

He should be fighting. But no one was fighting, not even the enemy aliens; they were all to busy  _ dying  _ from the hellfire raining from above. 

And then it stopped.

And the sky fell again, but this time in a pillar of light and power and blinding hope and Peter curled further around the gauntlet as something bowled through the spaceship like it was a tin can.

Help had come. 

Peter let himself grin, blinking blood out of a swelling eye and rolling sideways. He had a job, still, the most important on the battlefield. The Infinity Gauntlet, Iron Man rendition, seemed to vibrate in reminder.

But as Peter sat up, he couldn’t see a single friendly face, couldn’t see the destination he was supposed to reach. He wasn’t even sure where the time-van was anymore; the landmarks around him had been destroyed.

And yet another wave of aliens was charging forth.

“C’mon,” Peter hissed at himself, gathering his strength. “Come  _ on…” _

Of fuck, he  _ hurt.  _ He hurt, and he was outnumbered, and he didn’t know how he was going to win this, survive this. He didn’t know how he was going to keep the gauntlet away. How he was going to make Mr. Stark proud. 

There was only one thing he  _ could  _ do, and that was to fight, to try to keep the end from drifting into Thanos’s clutches for as long as possible.

But as it turned out, he didn’t have to.

That same beacon of rainbow energy drifted into the area before him, slowly dimming until he could see its source, suspended within it. 

A woman. A woman with power in her voice and in her eyes, a smirk on her face and a question on her lips. 

Peter was starstruck.

Maybe everything  _ would  _ be alright, after all.

“Hi,” Peter managed, voice hoarse with dust and blood. “I’m Peter Parker.”

“Hey, Peter Parker,” said the woman, her smirk growing into a smile. “Got something for me?”

Peter nodded, sitting up and offering the gauntlet with little ceremony. The glowing lady took it in nimble hands and turned, surveying the battlefield with the air of a soldier. 

“I don’t know how you’re getting it through all that,” Peter coughed. He wiped a bit of blood from his lip and looked up at the woman.

But the reassurance didn’t come from her.

It came from an accented voice to her left, strong and cold and utterly determined. “Don’t worry,” Okoye of Wakanda said. “She’s got help.”

Peter watched the group of warriors advance, not even blinking as Thanos’s great gaze turned upon them, and wondered if he should try and help.

And then they burst into movement, weapons charged, light blazing, and Peter sat back.

_ … Nah. They’ve got this. I mean, she’s got a  _ pegasus  _ for Heaven’s sake. _

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Peter swam in suspension between awareness and unconsciousness, his vision a haze of white and silver and splashes of brown. There were voices washing over him, but he couldn’t tell where they were coming from—right or left or memory or dream or reality.

He didn’t like those voices. When they spoke, they pulled him up, closer to the surface of conscious thought and closer to where it  _ hurt.  _

He didn’t belong up there. The air was wrong, the universe was wrong—everything was  _ wrong  _ up there. And it hurt up there, hurt his body and his soul, and he didn’t want to go back.

The voices fuzzed in and out as time tumbled along, speeding up and slowing to a crawl and seemingly disappearing altogether.

_ ‘Peter, sweetheart, I’m so sorry… you’ll pull through this, though. I know you will. We always pull through, you and me.’ _

He knew that voice, loved it. Peter’s aching form relaxed as his brain drifted around the comfort in that sound, drugged and exhausted and healing. Light peeked beneath his eyelids, searing into his mind, and warmth tingled through his fingers. It hurt.

Peter slept.

**Dreamscape-200004, Adjacent Astral Plane:** **_August 2023_ **

No.

_ No. _

_ PLEASE NO! _

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

The surface of awareness cracked, Peter Parker wrapping nearly desperate fingers around it. He didn’t break it, but he couldn’t let himself fall back down, back toward a truth that wasn’t his—that couldn’t possibly be his. 

The flickering colors were no kinder, and the voices no quieter. Peter winced, and something like fabric rubbed at his perception. Bubbles of consciousness formed and burst, and Peter drifted within them, floating between their wafer-thin edges.

Listening.

_ ‘Kid.’ _

He knew that voice too.

_ ‘I know you’re in there. You and your spider-healing—Vision’s been tracking your vitals and you’re damn ready to wake up.’ _

He didn’t… he didn’t want to… it hurt. It was wrong. He didn’t belong there, none of them belonged there. He may be alone, but at least here he was closer to home. 

_ ‘Open your eyes, kid.’ _

That voice didn’t speak in his home, anymore. 

_ ‘I mean it. You’re worrying your aunt.’ _

That voice didn’t speak in his home anymore and it was  _ wrong.  _ It was supposed to speak, and it didn’t, and it wasn’t  _ fair— _

_ ‘You’re worrying me, too.’ _

Well that wouldn’t do, now would it? Peter’s bubble of consciousness flickered, bursting and blowing and drifting, between home and not-home—

But that voice spoke in only one, and Peter was no longer sure which  _ was  _ home. 

So he latched onto the spiraling words, letting them tow him up between the cracks in the wall keeping Peter in unconsciousness. It splintered like stained glass. Peter fell heavily into his body, the sensation of the world slamming into him from all sides, and Peter groaned.

“There you go, kid. Almost there.” 

Oh,  _ ow…  _ what the fuck… just happened… 

“H’rts,” Peter slurred.

“Not as bad as it probably did.” Tony Stark’s voice came clear and strong. “You mended those bones in impressive time, and I don’t think your bleeding anywhere anymore. Congrats, I suppose. The hands are still working through their issues, but hey.”

“Wha… what happ’ned…” Peter stretched his fingers, feeling the tingle up through his arms.

“What do you remember?”

Peter wracked his fuzzy brain, frowning slightly. He blinked, dim light still shockingly bright in his vision, and turned his head toward Stark’s voice.

“Lady… torch lady…”

No that wasn’t right. He tried to chase the memory, but it disappeared like a dream did when you thought too hard about it, and Peter figured that was what it had to have been. He tried to search for what wasn’t fuzzy, concrete and definite.

The first thing he recalled was a kiss. 

That felt as wrong as… this dimension? Right, right, the universe was ending, and Loki had disappeared and—

Peter bolted upright, or at least tried to. There was a hand on his chest, gently coaxing him back to the bed beneath him as his sore muscles screamed a protest, and he found his tongue after a moment. 

“Is e’rybody okay—elevator took a bashing,” Peter managed.

The man beside him huffed a chuckle, though it was a bit strained. “So did you, kid. But everybody’s alright, thanks to you, though you gave us all a scare.”

 Peter frowned. Tony Stark, scared? That didn’t make sense. Now that he thought of it, Tony Stark sitting at his hospital bedside didn’t make a ton of sense either.

“Why’re you…” he began, before hissing as a trickle of agony gripped his throat. 

Stark shushed him. “I’ll spare you the lecture about fucking using your hands and body as a bomb shield until later.”

Oh, fuck—the glowy thing. Loki. Ned and Liz and weapons dealers and the end of the world. “How long was I…” He waved an expansive hand.

“Two days.”

_ “Wh’t?” _

“Cut yourself some slack, you almost died.” Stark’s voice was light, but his eyes were a mask of something flat and heavy. “What did you mean ‘torch lady?’”

Peter was a bit taken aback. “Did I…”

“You said that, yeah.”

It was all still fuzzy. But: “I had s’me weird dreams, I guess. Don’ really remember.”

“Ah. As long as I don’t have to keep an eye out for burning women. Well, another one.” Stark’s expression morphed into something that could have been a smile if his eyes had been less tired. 

“I th’nk you’re good,” Peter reassured. 

“Hm,” said the man, standing and fiddling with something beside Peter’s bed. “I’ll tell your aunt you’re awake.”

And then he left. The door closed behind his dapper form with barely a whisper. 

Peter wondered if he’d imagined the whole bizarre exchange.

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THEY HAD A CONVERSATION GUYS!!! 
> 
> :D :D :D :D :D
> 
> See, Irondad is confirmed, fnf out--
> 
> Kudos me? Comment? Other such feedbacky things? Yaaasss...


	24. An Intricate and Rather Exciting Dance

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter managed to stay awake while May was with him. But laughing was tiring, and when his Aunt kissed him one last time and slipped from the room to retrieve some food—Peter was famished—he found his eyes drifting shut again.

When he opened them, he was staring into the green, slitted gaze of a rather agitated, rather untamed cat.

“Hudhgjf,” came out instead of a shriek, and Peter’s heavy limbs tried to find purchase on the bed sheets beneath him. His palms and shoulders complained rather aggressively, but adrenaline kept Peter moving, until:

“It’s me,” meowed the creature, tail lashing as it tried to keep his balance.

“Wha—oh.” Peter relaxed slightly. “Mr. Loki.”

Loki wrapped his tail around his paws and settled comfortably on Peter’s knees.

“You are aware cats are usually…” Peter lifted his hands and mimed compressing something. “A lot smaller, yes?”

“I am a large feline,” Loki said. “It was necessary.”

“You’re more of a small panther, actually,” Peter grumbled. He pushed himself up so he was against the headrest, surveying the room for the first lucid time. 

The first thing he noticed was the plate of food on the table beside him, of a sort that would stay fresh despite the time he’d been asleep—a chocolate-chip bagel, slices of cheese, and a banana. But besides that, the room was small, well-furnished and equipped, and Peter knew instantly where he had to be. No hospital was built with heart monitors that tracked inhuman rhythms, or with glimmering bindings at the corners of the bed for patients with powers that needed restraint when non-coherent and dangerous. No hospital managed to make all of that look comfortable, nonthreatening, and sleek, with colorful splashes and natural light from a slightly domed skylight and shaped window panes. 

Peter was in the Avengers infirmary. Which was… in upstate New York now.

“How long did it take you to get here?” Peter wondered.

“Not long,” Loki stood, jumping off Peter’s sternum and padding next to him on the bed, “as the crow flies.” 

“Ah.” Peter instinctively tried to lift an arm to stroke the cat as he passed; a bad idea on two accounts, as Loki hissed and Peter’s arm and fingers ached soundly. The boy groaned. 

“Are you…” Loki’s ears twitched. “Alright?”

“I think so,” Peter replied. “Fast healer. I dunno what happened after I started falling, though…”

“Should have been there,” Loki murmured, the ‘r’ elongated in his cat’s mouth. 

Peter smiled a bit. The god wasn’t looking at him, and Peter reassured, “no offense, Mr. Loki, but I don’t think there was much you could have done.”

“Magic,” was the panther’s response.

“Okay maybe you’re right.”

Loki laughed, but there was no warmth to it. He nosed at Peter’s elbow to get him to turn his arm, his nose just as cold and wet as any cat, and Peter yelped and did as he was bid.

Loki padded down to his hand and sniffed at his palm. Turning his head Peter tried to glimpse the state of the stinging limbs.

“Oh…” he murmured, expression twisting. 

His hands did not look good. The skin was puckered and blistered, shot with a violet tinge that was decidedly  _ not  _ natural, and Peter’s fingers could hardly bend due to the swelling. Holding an energy bomb in one’s hands was apparently just as unhealthy as one would assume.

Loki mewed a curse, licking lightly at one of Peter’s fingers. The boy could hardly feel it.

“That’s… not normal,” Peter observed. “My spider-healing doesn’t work as fast on burns cuz spiders have low homeostasis or something, but it’s been like two days.”

“It’ll heal,” Loki said, glaring at the blisters as though he could soothe them by the sheer power of will. 

“Yeah.” Peter was confident in that; it’d just take longer. 

He tried to flex his fingers again, and they felt like unwieldy sausages. He accidentally whacked Loki in the nose, and the cat twitched angrily.

“Sorry,” Peter said.

“It matters not.” Loki bounded over his arm and padded up to the pillow of the bed, wrapping around Peter’s head. 

Peter asked, “And how did it go with the weapons guys?”

Loki cackled, and it sounded terrifying from a feline throat. “Just wonderfully. Their leader’s name is Toomes, their engineer’s name is Mason, and they are now under the impression that they’re working for me.”

Peter’s eyes widened. “You—”

“Turned double agent? It wasn’t difficult; I’m an Avengers-level convict and they do not scratch that ceiling. I have influence over petty criminals, in that way,” Loki purred. Peter couldn’t see him from where he was tucked up against Peter’s head, but he could imagine Loki looked pleased with himself.

“So did you set up how we’re gonna beat them?” Peter asked excitedly. “Just round ‘em up in their lair, even?”

Loki huffed. “We are not going to just ‘round them up.’ We are going to perform an intricate and rather exciting dance, using my image to gain attention, and convince a certain billionaire that he needs to listen to you.” 

Peter paused. “... What?”

“I’m going to get Stark to fight by your side, idiot.”

_ “What?” _

Loki boxed one of Peter’s ears with his paw, his claws ripping at the soft skin, and Peter winced and shooed him off. The god climbed over his head to sit on his chest, staring at him, unimpressed. 

“You need Stark. We need Stark. The universe needs Stark. Therefore I am getting him in on our plans by allowing you, man of spiders, to prove your worth in battle against these weapons dealers.”

Peter’s mouth flopped open and shut as he tried to voice just how  _ terrible  _ an idea that was. “Mr. Loki…”

“Yes?”

“Why can’t we just take them down? I’m sure that’s enough.”

Loki’s whiskers twitched with the same energy as an eyebrow being cocked. “Enough to make Stark trust you enough to trust me by connection? I very much doubt it.”

“But…” Peter sighed, giving up his argument. The god was, unfortunately, being quite logical; Peter just didn’t like the air of deceit this plan radiated. “Alright, fine. But you can set this up so everything will go smoothly?”

“I can get everyone in position, both on the side of the dealers and the side of Stark—the latter indirectly.” Loki licked a paw and ran it over his ears. “And then it’s your time to shine.”

“How are you gonna do that?” Peter wondered. He fidgeted with his foot against the base of the bed, edgy with the fact that he couldn’t move his hands with ease.

“Easy,” Loki said. “I convinced them they needed to try and steal an Iron Man suit.”

Peter stared at him.

Loki grinned.

Peter kept staring. “That’s… There’s no way the dealers can win in a scuffle with a suit. That’s somewhat brilliant, actually.”

The cat puffed its chest, flicking its tail in satisfaction. “Indeed. You will have to look out for the capabilities of their weapons of course; the suit may not be as invulnerable as it usually is against the technologies of aliens.”

“Right.”

Loki nodded. “So, I pretend to have located a suit, and the dealers come to where I say. I make myself known there, and Stark and company comes to try and stop me. In the resulting fight, you web them up, ‘defeat’ me, and then we speak to Stark while he can see I’m not a threat and we can convince him to hear us out.”

“And if it all goes terribly wrong?”

“Then I pretend to kidnap you, probably.”

Peter chuckled. “Let’s avoid that, my aunt would freak.”

“I agree. It’d be uncomfortable to try and hide us both in the sewers or abandoned warehouses anyway.”

“Alright then.” Peter shifted, crossing his legs and bringing himself further upright. Loki lost the battle with balance on the moving blanket and ended up curled on it, looking somewhat miffed. Peter tried not to laugh.

Reaching for the plate of food beside him, Peter positioned himself comfortably and surveyed the god. “Is it safe for us to be discussing this?” he wondered after a moment. “The Compound has cameras…”

Loki waved a paw. “This room is  _ remarkably  _ out of touch with the technology and AI of the rest of the building, it seems. We’re quite safe.”

“You can do that? You’re magic…”

“It’s Asgardian. Our power comes from the manipulation of form and function, of ourselves and other objects. It’s child’s play.”

Peter nodded. “Alright then. How, where, and when are we going to pull this off?”

* * *

 

“How’s he doing?”

Tony slumped into the chair beside Rhodey, taking a hearty swig out of the thermos in his hand. “He woke up. Bit woozy, but he was talking, at least.”

“Good. Aunt?”

“She went in, they talked, she went to get food, I  _ did  _ not hover, and then he fell back asleep again. Probably still asleep.” Tony swirled the caffeine in his cup and drank again. 

Rhodes nodded, blowing out a breath. Vision, on the other side of the table, was watching Tony with those curious, unreadable eyes, a bottle cap rolling between his fingers and the tabletop. Tony wondered where he’d gotten it.

“Nobody saw?” Rhodey asked. 

“I don’t think so. But he was in bad shape when I arrived—” Remarkably, Tony’s voice didn’t falter— “and there was no way he pulled the mask off after calling for help. Somebody must have done it. Hopefully they didn’t realize what they were doing, or who they were doing it to... I found the mask in his pocket, so at least whoever saved our asses didn’t run off with my multi-million dollar technology.”

“Ow them a thank you, then,” Rhodey said. 

“I do indeed.” Tony took another gulp of coffee. “Getting them to believe he hadn’t smuggled the bomb in was remarkably easy; he saved the other idiot inhabitants, having accidentally gotten a hold of a bit of my tech through our internship connection bullshit, and therefore I’m paying for damages. Badabing, badaboom. And I had to hide the extent of the injuries from his aunt, otherwise the quick recovery would give away his identity. Lying to someone with mom-senses is  _ not  _ easy, I do not recommend it.”

Tony remembered the blazing in May’s eyes and shivered.

“So, anyway,” he said, changing the subject, “besides the latest crisis, how did we do while I was in DC?”  
Vision, the bottle cap now rolling expertly over his thumb and wrist, hummed. “There has been… nothing out of the ordinary. No more strange dead, or other signs from Loki.”

“It’s been five days.” Tony frowned.

“Maybe you misinterpreted?” Rhodey offered.

“Or maybe he’s up to something. Who am I kidding, of course he is; I just didn’t think it’d  _ take so fucking long.” _

Tony ran his hands somewhat aggressively through his hair. He knew it probably cracked through his put-together mask to the bedraggled character beneath, and he wished he these two didn’t have to see it.

_ No. They can. They’re safe. Stop… I don’t know, whatever you’re doing,  _ stop.

He’d been sleeping worse than usual. Strange and vivid dreams kept drifting between his nightmares, and Tony almost preferred the strangling terror of the latter to how uneasy and  _ wrong  _ the world felt when he woke up from the former. 

Tony hadn’t felt like he belonged in his skin for a long, long time. But now it was worse, like a constant prickling within his blood, telling him to get on with something he didn’t understand.

Vision flicked the bottle cap to him, and Tony’s mind was forced back to the present as he caught it out of the air. The android offered him a smile, and Tony found the strength to return it.

Rhodey’s fingers tapped against Tony’s chair, the light from the joints of his prosthetics illuminating the legs of the table. “We got clearance to operate if needed,” he mused. “Once we make any move, this is going to end up public knowledge. Perhaps that’s what Loki wants. To make a scene, to gain an entrance? That’s what it was last time.”

“Waiting for us to make the first move,” Vision added.

Tony hummed. It wasn’t out of character for the god, as far as he knew, but the idea was distasteful. “In a game we don’t know the rules to,” he sighed. “In that scenario, we hardly have any power at all.”

Nothing.  _ Nothing.  _

And Tony couldn’t keep up this waiting, this suspended state of  _ what if.  _ Anymore than he already was, at least. But adding the Loki what-ifs to the universal what-ifs was too much effort, and Tony would like maybe five consecutive hours of sleep at  _ some  _ point.

“So, what,” Rhodey wondered. “Should we wait? Or act?”

Tony rolled the bottle-cap over his knuckles, the divots pressing into his skin like a clock ticking rhythmically.  _ Bump bump bump.  _ “On what?” he asked. “We don’t have… anything to go on. Anything at all. He could be anywhere, doing anything! If we wait, we’d be too late, but we  _ can’t—” _

“Tones,” Rhodey said, his voice soft but strong as it cut through Tony’s ramble. “Look at me.”

Tony did, realizing his breathing had been becoming rather quick. Embarrassed, but calmer, he averted his eyes as soon as he had met Rhodey’s.

There was a second of quiet, during which a couple of things became strikingly prominent. One, the quiet whir of Rhodey’s leg supports—Tony would have to fix that before whatever had come loose to cause the sound made more trouble; two, Vision’s breathing, strange and deep and arrhythmic (the android didn’t technically have to respirate, but he’d been trying to ‘practice’, though he hadn’t quite mastered the natural rhythm yet); three, that FRIDAY had “Bad Liar” by Imagine Dragons stuck in her head if the humming of the air-conditioner was any indication; and four, that Tony’d dropped the bottle cap beneath the table and couldn’t remember when he’d done so.

Tony leaned down to grab it, then tossed it back to Vision. The android spun it on his finger, watching the way it twirled with a rapt sort of focus, and Tony watched him in turn.

Rhodey just kept tapping his fingers and strategizing. Military men—they did that.

Tony swallowed.

_ Stop that,  _ he told himself again.  _ This one’s  _ your  _ military man. _

“I think we have to just wait,” his friend admitted finally. “Your right; we have no leads and nothing to attack, and as soon as we start pointing our guns at New York people will know. We just have to wait for Loki, see if we can stop him as he goes.”  
“Tick tock,” Tony murmured. 

Rhodes and Vision echoed. “Tick tock.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot doesn't pause for Peter to recover, no sir. 
> 
> *cough cough* idiots.
> 
> Aaaanyway! Hope you enjoyed this chapter, and I'll see y'all soon. :)


	25. Stuck in my Skin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HEY ALL I MADE IT. It's been a hell of a week... but here we are! :)
> 
> All you amazing dorks were clamoring for the exact opposite of this in the comments and I'm going to do it anyway because Reasons (classified, only authors can access). *innocent grin*
> 
> Enjoy!

 

 **Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter didn’t see Mr. Stark again before he was cleared for returning to Queens by doctors with kind smiles and unrecognized names. He caught a glimpse of the man, standing and watching through the windows of the Compound as Peter and May walked hand-in-hand across the lawn. 

Apparently, it was already Thursday. Homecoming was next Saturday, and though Peter wasn’t surprised, the shock of it already nearing the end of October was somewhat jarring. May had made it perfectly clear that he was not going to school today, and Loki had hissed at him not even to _think_ about putting on the suit.

The suit, which he’d found laying at the base of his bed, concealed under a perfectly sized pair of pants and a shirt with a wonderfully cringey science pun displayed across it. Along with a loose, downey pair of gloves that felt heavenly against the still-raw skin of his hands.

Peter raised his free hand as he crossed the grass to wave at Mr. Stark in the window, somewhat pointedly. 

The man met his eyes, but didn’t return the gesture.

Peter didn’t know quite how to interpret that, so he just slipped into the backseat of the car Happy was driving and blew out a breath.

He felt almost as good as new. He’d felt that way yesterday, but they’d insisted he stay a final twenty-four hours.

May kept saying how lucky he’d been, how remarkable the fall and the care must have been. Peter thought he did a good job sounding confused and grateful and not at all suspicious; his aunt was wonderful, but he couldn’t pull the Spider-Man card even after this.

“Thank you for the ride,” May said, leaning forward so Happy knew she was talking to him. She was currently in the back with Peter, making sure he didn’t drop dead, which was perfectly fine with the young teenager. He hadn’t had a hug in four days, apparently, and the extended one that his aunt was gracing him with was immensely comforting. Peter snuggled a bit closer to her.

“Of course,” Happy said, sounding awkward. “Couldn’t have our favorite intern taking the subway back after his fall.”

Peter huffed.

Happy coughed.

May raised an eyebrow, though neither of the boys saw. “Does your facility take Blue Cross Blue Shield?”

Happy’s face twisted in confusion, and Peter held in a laugh. “It’s insurance,” he explained.

“Ah. Why… would that matter?”

May cocked her head, carding a hand through Peter’s curls and making the boy purr. “Payment for your care.”

Happy burst out laughing. “You think—Tony’s going to—don’t worry,” he spluttered.

Peter met May’s eyes, and they both frowned. “But…”

“We’ll cover everything. Benefits of the, er, internship,” Happy said, giving them a thumbs-up in the rearview mirror. 

Before the conversation could get any more awkward, an elegant bird swooped down to linger beside the car for a moment. May gasped, and Happy attempted not to swerve the car. 

Peter grinned and gave the onyx creature a thumbs-up of his own.

Flapping wings longer than Peter’s femurs, Loki caught air and swooped away again. Peter watched him go with a slight smile, feeling rather at home against May’s warmth and watching the god fly away.

Vaguely, Peter wondered what he was to Loki. What Loki was to him. They were… saving the world together, saving each other on occasion. He’d worried about the god when he’d gone off to fight, and Loki had seemed so _concerned_ when he’d found Peter injured. Loki’d protected him, worked with him, laughed with him.

Killed for him.

And though it had only been a week and a half since he’d found the grimy, tired Asgardian slumped in that alley, Peter cared about Loki. And it was fairly obvious, though he was sure Loki would never mention it, that the god cared about him.

They were… allies. More than that. They were a team.  

_Team Nefarious Plans._

Peter rather liked that. 

 

Friday took an eternity to roll around, but once Peter was walking into school, everything proceeded at lightning speed. 

Ned’s hug was like nothing Peter’d ever experienced, long and tight and almost desperate. Peter returned it in kind, lifting his friend up with enhanced strength and spinning him around. His backpack lifted weightlessly from the centrifugal force, and Loki’s hiss of consternation could be heard through the pocket.

 _“Dude,”_ Ned breathed. “Dude. You were—I am—”

“Good to see you too,” Peter laughed. 

Ned pulled away, stuffing his hands somewhat aggressively into the pocket of his hoodie. “You almost fucking _died,_ Peter.”

“But I didn’t.”  
“But you didn’t! You saved us all instead! Dude, you fell and everyone lost their _shit_ and Liz was freaking out—cuz like, you dying so soon after you’ve confessed your love for each other and whatever—and then the park ranger—”

Peter cut him off. “Woah, woah, who said anything about confessing love?”

“Um, you kissed her after we won _national_ decathlon,” Ned said, raising his eyebrows at Peter. “You’re set, dude.”

Peter nodded, trying to convince himself that the twisting in his gut was excitement, not fear. 

“So yeah.” Ned picked up where he left off. “We all got out of the elevator by, like, climbing out onto the next floor? And they told us to stay there, but I thought you were _dead,_ so I ran off and they were chasing me and there are _so many stairs_ at the Washington Monument oh my gosh.” Ned took a breath, nodding to a group of boys watching them curiously from the other side of the hall

Peter frowned and stuck close to Ned as they made their way through the hallways. People were looked at him, which was decidedly unusual, and what was more, they _waved_ at him. Nobody noticed Peter generally, and the attention was putting him a little on-edge.

“Yeah, the team told everyone what you did with the glowy-thing and the whole school’s really grateful,” Ned elaborated. “Except Flash, he’s an asshole.”  

Peter nodded, still uncomfortable. “So…”

“Don’t worry, the whole—” Ned made the web-shooter hand motion— “is still a secret. People just think you’re a normal hero.”  
_A normal hero._

“It only worked because I’m Spider-Man,” Peter said. It was, for some reason, quite important that Ned understood this.

His friend just shrugged. “You saved everyone’s life, and a ton of historical infrastructure. People are grateful no matter how you did it.”

Flushing, Peter nodded. He wasn’t used to this; this affirmation to his face instead of through the mask, and it didn’t feel quite deserved. But he shook himself and sped his pace, coming up on his locker.

Ned continued with his story, and Peter was happy for the distraction. “So anyway I got outside, after running down all those stairs, and there were like six park rangers following me at the time, but I couldn’t listen, y’know? And you were on a stretcher in an ambulance and Tony Stark was there with his armor and everything.”

Peter frowned, his fingers pausing where they fiddled with his locker. “What? Mr. Stark was in DC?”

“Yeah. He must’ve been there before, otherwise he couldn’t have gotten there so fast.”

“But…” Peter trailed off.

“He said he was taking you to his hospital in the Compound. Did he not do that?” Ned looked concerned.

“No, he did,” Peter was quick to assure, “but I just didn’t think he’d… y’know, have come himself.”

“He was there a while. I think he even rode back with you in the ambulance, cuz I never saw him get back in his suit.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Peter said, finishing opening his locker. 

Ned hummed. “It would have if you’d seen his face. He seemed really worried. And he gave me his phone number.”

 _That_ made Peter stop in his tracks, his backpack half stuffed into his locker. He stared at his friend, trying to read if Ned was pulling his leg. But Ned’s tone was the same earnest excitement as before, and he met Peter’s eyes without hesitation. 

“W- _what?”_

“On a receipt. He told me to call him if anything ‘like this’ happened again. I think he meant if anything happened to you.”

Peter huffed a laugh. “Now you’re being ridiculous.”

“That’s what happened!”  
“Are you quite finissshed?” came a somewhat strangled voice from within the backpack, and Peter realized he’d likely been squishing Loki against the corner of the locker. 

“Sorry, sorry,” he said, radjusting and opening the zipper. Loki slithered out onto his palm, and Ned blanched.

“That’s—that’s the snake, from…” Realization so blinding Peter felt he should shield his eyes dawned on Ned’s face. “Ooooooh!”

“Yeah.”

“Loki chased Flash around the gym for like fifteen minutes for you!”

Loki looked unimpressed. “I did not. That isss far beneath my ssstandardsss and I’m offended you would even suggessst sssuch actions.”

Peter snorted into his elbow as Ned blithered an apology, including something that sounded like _‘please don’t knife me again’._

“He’s kidding Ned,” Peter said. “Don’t give yourself a stroke.”

 

 

Liz sat with them at lunch.

Correction: Liz and company sat with them at lunch, filling their table so the usual stragglers dispersed to other parts of the cafeteria. Peter spent the whole time telling and re-telling the story in the elevator, gaining more of a crowd and growing more and more uncomfortable each time.

“You were so brave.” Liz was smiling at him, and it took more strength than it should have to smile back.

“Thanks,” Peter murmured. “I’m just glad everyone’s okay now.”

More questions assaulted him, and Peter navigated them with as much grace as he could. He tried to move as little as he could. Loki’s constant shifting beneath his shirt did nothing to reduce the itchy, uneasy feeling beneath Peter’s skin, especially because Liz’s hand kept finding its way to his wrist or his shoulder or his back and Peter was terrified she was going to brush against the snake. 

“Yeah, my hands got it the worst,” Peter said for the third time, extending his palms face-up and trying not to focus too much on the way Loki’s scales slid across him. “But it’s not so bad anymore. The people at Stark Industries worked their magic, and I’m practically as good as new.” He tried to sound excited, interested, but his tone just got flatter as more people started speaking over each other.

By the time fifteen minutes had passed, Peter was tensing every time anyone so much as twitched. Ned had noticed, sidling sideways on the bench to give Peter as much space as he could, but Liz was still brushing him and speaking to him. The words were kind and her voice was calm, but it hardly mattered as everything started to compound on itself, growing to deafening input. 

Peter shiverred, curling in on himself a bit. His hands were starting to sting, the blisters still a bit raw, and he tried to pay attention as the words of his classmates became steadily louder.

Soon he was agreeing with things he hadn’t been listening too and making comments on things he didn’t understand, and the lights were shining in his eyes with an intensity he could have sworn they didn’t have before. His spidey-sense began to tingle in a constant, unnerving buzz, and he felt as though his breath was sticking in his throat.

The sixth time he was asked the same question, Peter felt something rip against his ribcage.

“I have to, uh, run to the restroom,” Peter managed, standing abruptly. Ned offered a hand as Peter tried to extricate himself from the bench, but the thought of touching even his friend made Peter queasy. So he just thanked Ned, sincerely, and hauled ass from the room.

As soon as he was in the bathroom, he was tearing at his shirt. 

“Off,” he choked. “Off, off, _off—”_

Loki practically teleported out of Peter’s cuff, landing on the floor with a serpentine slap. He shifted, scrambling to his feet as Peter’s knees buckled and he pressed his palms to the grimey bathroom floor, forcing himself to breathe.

But he could taste the bleach of the cleaning product when he inhaled, and he could smell the urine in the bowl of the next stall over where someone hadn’t flushed. The lights reflected off the mirrors with as much intensity as lazers. Each creak of a stall door, drip of a leaking sink, flicker of breath from the god beside him was maddening, and the sand grains beneath Peter’s palms were nearly painful. 

Everything was paralyzing, intense to an extreme that Peter couldn’t even remember how to think, how to move. Peter clenched his eyes shut, his hands ratcheting up to cover his mouth and nose. But he could still feel the sand sticking to him, feel the air chilling his exposed skin.

Too loud too pungent too textured too rancid too bright too _much—_

The lights clicked off.

Peter saw the darkness filter through his closed eyelids. He blinked them open, forcing himself to focus on the constant cream-colored walls of the stall. 

A sink trickled on, then gushed, and Peter winced at the sudden strength of the noise, drowning all the others out. But after a moment, he honed in on it, listening intently to that single sound now dominating his hearing. A calming of those two senses, the strongest in his body, was enough to slow Peter’s perception to a speed his mind could process.

Time ticked, and Peter found himself shaking his head, able to ignore the smells and textures and light as he usually could. He tested his voice, and found that he could tolerate it again.

“Oh…” he moaned. “That’s… that was… rather worse than it usually is.”

Loki’s voice came tentative and quiet, and Peter could just barely make it out over the rushing water. “Are you alright?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, then stronger: “yeah. You can turn that off, now. Thank you.”

The sound ceased, and Loki opened the door to the stall to peer down at where Peter was still sitting against the toilet. He knelt, eyes calculating but soft.

“Is that a usual occurrence?” the god asked.

Peter shrugged. “It’s happened a handful of times since the spider-bite, but not usually so… intense. Often it’s only one sense, like my hearing or my sense of smell, but this time it was sort of all of them.”  
“Hm.”

They were silent for a moment. 

(Truly silent. Peter didn’t feel the need to gouge out his eardrums at the voices outside.)

“Thank you,” Peter said again. “For… the lights and stuff.”  
“You’re most welcome. I had hoped it would help.”

Peter beckoned, and Loki made a face but ended up sitting on the bathroom floor as well. Peter said, “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“You didn’t. I was simply confused.”

“Same.” Peter smiled. “I just… get stuck in my skin sometimes.”

* * *

 

It took most of Loki’s self control to keep himself from looking away from Peter as the words hung between them in a way they hadn’t been intended to. The shadows of the dark room made Peter’s face appear severe, casting his jawline in sharp shadow and making his eyes a bit sunken. Loki could only imagine how he himself looked.

_Stuck in my skin._

He smiled ruefully. “I can understand that.”

“You shift a lot though,” Peter observed. “Not really a constant skin.”

Loki watched him for a long moment, trying to decide how—if—he was going to respond to that.   

“I don’t…” the god finally began. He sighed, then lifted his hand, flexing the fingers and watching the way his skin rippled. He could almost see the scales, the feathers, the fur, even still. “I don’t usually shift this much.”

Peter looked apologetic. “I don’t mean to make you turn into things, it just always seems to be, well, necessary.” The boy fidgeted, and Loki could sense him misunderstanding. “I hope it’s not annoying or anything.”

“It’s not… it’s not annoying, no,” Loki said. But the hesitance in his tone was obvious to Peter, and the boy looked at him critically, and a little guiltily. The self-depreciation in Peter’s expression was enough to force Loki to continue. 

“I… ever since what happened in my own timeline, I’ve been—” Loki searched for words. “Itchy. Dissatisfied. _Stuck._ Like _I_ don’t feel right.”

He found that he couldn’t keep looking at Peter, not even in the dark, not even without focusing on him. Even now, he wanted to shift; he’d be so much stronger, better, _worthier_ in any other skin, _anything._

Peter didn’t speak, waiting for Loki to continue. 

Loki did. “When I’m something else, I don’t look at these hands and see gore and weapons and betrayal. I don’t imagine the gauntlet around my throat. I don’t hear the cries, I don’t remember how I couldn’t protect him—I don’t _remember.”_

And suddenly, remember was all he could do. His father’s lies, his broken ambitions, the words of all those he’d killed, a thousand thoughts that weren’t his own forced into his mind with subtlety he hadn’t discovered—Loki remembered. He remembered the times he’d died, what’d he’d learned in each new lifetime. What new lies he’d discovered. What’d he’d been told. 

_You don’t belong. They saved you, you owe them, but this is not your home. You don’t belong anywhere._

And Loki remembered where he had belonged, in the bridge of the spaceship on its way to a new world, his brother handing him his knife by the blade so Loki could easily grasp the hilt and smiling. Not sadly, not blindly; Thor smiled with full, final understanding of who Loki was and an acceptance of _whoever he’d become._

And then that smile had turned to a roar, and that roar had turned to screams of pain, screams of grief, and Loki couldn’t do—hadn’t done anything. Not strong enough to protect him, not brave enough the protect the Stone, not fast enough to kill a Titan. 

Not enough. 

He could sense Peter’s disbelief, sense his pity, and Loki stared at his hands and saw blood instead. 

“This body is me,” Loki said hoarsely. “And I don’t want to be me. Not anymore.”

He didn’t look at Peter. If he could stop listening, keep himself from hearing whatever useless platitude was coming next, he would have in a heartbeat. 

He wanted to shift, the near-constant feeling all the stronger. 

But Peter didn’t say anything. Not one word. 

He just rose onto his knees and wrapped his arms around the lost god, gently holding him in an embrace too strong for a child and too innocent for a warrior and entirely, undeniably _Peter._

And Loki Odinson, Prince of Lies, God of Mischief and Lord of Trickery, sobbed into the boy’s arms. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*
> 
>  
> 
> Also I saw Far From Home finally and pardon my language but what the actual, literal, genuine FUCK JUST HAPPENED??? I can't--Marvel wth--I am--how could you write something like that--I don't know--AAAAAAH--I guess now I gotta figure out why Stephen was "unavailable" for actually doing anything useful and like,,, does someone want to just EXPLAIN those end-credit scenes to me because UM WHAT


	26. Gives it its Tang

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who's BACK? That's right, it's me.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter made cookies. 

Perhaps it was stupid and trivial and unimportant, but it definitely didn’t  _ hurt.  _ And right now, that was all Peter could do. All he knew how to do. 

Loki hadn’t spoken for the rest of the day. He’d just shifted into a snake as soon as Ned had appeared to check on them in the bathroom (little late, Leeds, but thanks anyway), curling into Peter’s shirt a bit tighter than usual. 

He’d had silver scales beneath his eyes, this time.

They sat in silence, Peter on one of the kitchen chairs in the thankfully aunt-less apartment and Loki still serpentine on the table. The scent of cinnamon and butter filtered through the air as Peter’s snickerdoodles flattened beautifully in the oven, unseen. Peter wanted to say something, encourage Loki to return to his natural form, but he didn’t dare risk alienating the god further. 

He kept a hand against Loki’s scales, not holding, but brushing against where he coiled. Even if he was a useless Midgardian without any knowledge of the history and magic that had hurt this man so much, Peter was here and would continue to be here, ready whenever Loki was. 

The touch was just to remind them both of that.

The timer went off, making Peter jump and startling a hiss out of Loki. It was the first sound he’d made since they’d left the bathroom, and Peter wondered if it was a good sign.

“Be right back,” Peter said, standing slowly and making his way into the kitchen. 

By some miracle, he’d gotten them golden with the first time increment, and was able to pull the cookies from the oven right then. Not patient enough to wait for them to cool, Peter slid them off onto a plate immediately. He broke four of the sugary disks.

On an afterthought, Peter grabbed the milk from the fridge and pinned two mugs between his chin and sternum. He likely looked exceedingly ridiculous, but Loki didn’t react as he slid back to the table.  
Positioning the food and drink a bit nervously, Peter poured them each a bit of milk and asked, “do you have cookies in Asgard?”

After too long, Loki shook his head. Peter felt like cheering.

“Well, I’m about to change your life. For the better.” He carefully slid a still steaming snickerdoodle onto his palm and offered it to Loki. “You might want to, uh…” he waved a hand, gesturing to his body and then Loki’s.

Loki gave him a look that said he knew  _ exactly  _ what Peter was doing, but shifted anyway. Peter tried to conceal his relief as the fully Asgardian form manifested on the table and slid down into the chair beside Peter. 

Loki took the cookie a bit suspiciously, hands trembling slightly. The intensity of his gaze on the pastry made Peter surprised it didn’t crumble to nothing as he took a slow bite.

Peter stuffed a cookie into his own mouth, savoring the crackle of a well-baked snickerdoodle, and watched as Loki took another nibble. And then another. And then shoved the remaining half into his mouth so quickly Peter barely had time to blink.

Loki turned to him, eyes comically wide, and spoke for the first time in eight hours. 

“What sorcery is this?”

Peter laughed, unbelievably glad he’d done something right. “It’s not sorcery,” he said, handing Loki another cookie. “It’s chemistry.”

“Edible… science?”

“Exactly! Flour and butter and sugar and cinnamon and stuff.” Peter took a gulp of milk, swishing the crumbs out of his teeth.   
Loki looked at the cookie in his hand somewhat morosely. “I am not particularly apt with science, unfortunately.”

"It’s not…” Peter tried to explain. “It’s following a recipe. You do that in Asgard, I’m sure.”

Loki nodded, a bit hesitant. “Nothing like this.”

“What sort of sweets  _ do  _ you have?” Peter asked. “Desserts.”

“Cakes,” Loki replied instantly. “Sweet buns.”

Peter scooched a bit closer, interested now. One didn’t usually discuss the intricacies of Asgardian culture, especially not over snickerdoodles. Speaking of: “try it with the milk.”

Loki helped himself, looking a bit more like himself. “Are these common in your realm?”

“Cookies? Yeah. At least on our planet.” A thousand things occurred to him at once. “Do you have honey in Asgard? Sugar? Cinnamon?  _ Chocolate?” _

“We do have honey, though I believe the species it comes from is slightly different.”

“What, are your bees killer?” Peter was joking, but Loki nodded earnestly. 

“Yes. Sugar is common, but I’ve never heard of this… cinnamon.”

“That’s what’s on the cookie,” Peter said, pointing to the cooling snickerdoodles. “The brown stuff that gives it its tang.”

“I approve of this cinnamon,” Loki said, and Peter laughed.

“I’m glad.”

“Perhaps I will make you a sweetcake,” Loki mused. “Or a meat pie. I was rather good at meat pies.”

Peter smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that. And Mr. Loki?”

“Yes?”

“You know I’ll always be here, right? For whoever you need to become at the time.” 

Loki looked up, and the smile on his face was shy and genuine. “I know, Peter.”

They ate until the cookies were gone and the milk was depleted and the air smelled of vulnerable comfort and open connection. 

Loki didn’t shift for the rest of the night. 

* * *

 

“It’s not magic, this time,” Loki said as he crouched on Peter’s windowsill, trying to keep from rolling his eyes. “It’s—”

“Yes, yes, an intricate and rather exciting dance, I understand.” Peter was fiddling with the mask of his suit and shuffling his feet on the carpet beneath him. “Are you sure you’re going to have enough time?”

“I’ve got all night.”

“But…” Peter took a breath, and Loki could almost see him forcing down his cynicism. “Okay. You want me at the dock warehouse when?”

“Ten in the morning, unless catastrophe strikes before,” Loki repeated.

After much convincing, they’d decided to enact their plan on Sunday. Loki had resisted the idea, loath to linger and wait for Saturday to pass, but Peter had been determined and Loki had given up the argument when it became clear he wouldn’t win without a knife. So they’d waited through the day together, and Loki had learned… quite a number of things.

He’d learned Midgardians went to coffee shops when they didn’t really want to leave their homes but had to because of meddling aunts. Mutton wasn’t often consumed in this city, and he’d have to stuff his meat pies with something else. And sweatshirts and sweatpants made him nearly invisible in the New York streets; maybe there was something to Thor’s strategy after all.

But the most important thing Loki learned was that the Tenth Doctor in the alternate universe of the… theatre-but-not show  _ Doctor Who _ was the best of the Doctors. Peter was very adamant about this. He assured Loki that other Midgardians would tell him falsely, claiming other numbered physicians were superior, and that Loki was not to be deceived. 

Peter’d subjected him to five short segments of the story, and Loki had to agree with the evidence presented to him. It was a rather entertaining production, though the multiversal theories were all off. 

But now it was time to set things up, to be ready for the implementation of their scheme the next day. They’d chosen a place of least disruption, as unlikely to cause harm to outward parties as possible; an old storage building by the dock, containing boats and not much else. Loki didn’t much care either way. 

“You’ll be careful?” Peter asked.

Loki smirked. “Of course not.”

The boy chuckled, and the nervousness had decreased somewhat. He still didn’t quite believe in Loki’s ideas, Loki could tell, but he would. Soon. In about ten hours. 

Loki’s mouth was almost watering with the excitement of the scheme, the fight. His tongue flicked over the front of his teeth, and he turned back to the city outside Peter’s window. “Can I go? This position is quite uncomfortable.”

“Bye,” Peter said, waving a bit sarcastically. “See you in time for battle.”

“In time for world-saving,” Loki agreed, and lept out of the window.

He relished freefall for a moment—almost a moment too long—then drew on his magic and shifted. It was a precise shift, as Loki was concentrated on it, for no reason aside from his new understanding of why it was so appealing.

He hated himself for it, but he couldn’t staunch the relief tingling through him when he spread bird’s wings and spiraled into the sky. 

The wind was quick against his feathers, and he slid through it more than he sliced. Above the crowded city, the smog of the air was a bit more obvious than usual, sour against Loki’s avian tongue. He beat his wings faster, accelerating over the area and banking down toward the lair of his new minions.

This was his favorite part; had always been. Loki tucked his wings to his sides, and the air slowly dragged away his momentum until, for a moment, he was just hanging within the air. For one heartbeat, Loki was suspended, not Earth and not space, not falling and not flying, not within the grip of this reality.

And then he dived, curling like a torpedo through the wind. He shot through the hole in the warehouse roof faster than a discharged bullet. The sudden air resistance as he snapped his wings open nearly shredded the feathers and bones, but Loki was shifting before any damage could be done.

When he stepped easily onto the floor, flicking a nonexistent piece of dust from his tunic, the inhabitants were staring at him.

There were less today, and Loki didn’t see Toomes. He did, however, see Mason, and stalked toward him on a whim. “It’s time,” he said.

“S-sir?”

“Call your leader,” Loki said. “Your heist begins at ten o’clock tomorrow. I’ve lined up all the beads; all you have to do is thread them.”

Terror and excitement and confusion warred for dominance on Mason’s face, and Loki rolled his eyes. 

“Weapons. The dock near Queens, boat containment building. Ten o’clock,” he snarled.

“Yes,” stuttered the engineer. “Okay.”

“I’ll get the suit there. You get your soldiers, armed will everything you have. You  _ do  _ have something capable of disabling electronics, correct?”

Mason nodded mutely, pointing toward a smaller weapon on the table beside him. “Concentrated electromagnetic pulses, tested on Ultron technology and powered with the strength to shut all derivations down.”

Loki nodded. “Good. Assuming you do  _ everything I say,  _ you might even succeed.”

Mason said, “this was  _ your  _ idea.”

“But you’re the ones who are going to have to  _ accomplish it,  _ now aren’t you?” Loki hissed, manifesting his knife. “I can only optimize your chances; I cannot assure them.”

Mason raised his hands in surrender, and so did everyone else in the warehouse. 

_ Humans. _

As much as Loki appreciated the strength of Midgardian fear and the influence it provided, he did wish that it didn’t render his minions  _ incompetent.  _ Not that he truly needed these men to be intelligent. But still, they could at least be  _ articulate,  _ couldn’t they?

Loki sighed, grumbling under his breath, and said one more time, “ten o’clock, Midgardians.”

“Yessir.”

He wasn’t sure who said it, but it was good enough.

And now, the fun part. Loki twisted himself back into the body of a raven and lept upward again, climbing through the hole in the ceiling without another word. 

His plan was rather simple, compared to what he usually worked with. But there were many more factors, human ones that he couldn’t control, and though Loki would never admit it, it made him irritable. The dealers needed to show up, Stark needed to show up, and Peter needed to show up; that was all the easy bit. Where it got dicey was where Loki was relying on trust. The stuff he’d forced between himself and the weapons dealers was necessary, sure, but the most essential was the trust he hoped— _ knew  _ underlay the relationship between Peter Parker and Tony Stark.

Maybe. 

By the time Loki was done, there would be trust. And in Loki’s experience, the easiest channel to cultivate trust was pride. Specifically, respect.

Loki was going to make these two idiots proud. And then he was going to make them respect each other. 

And then, they were going to save the universe. 

* * *

 

The Protector met Peter Parker early Sunday morning.

She blinked into existence for the second time ever, fizzling with unsorted data, and was almost overwhelmed by hundreds more readings now emanating from the body she covered.

The charge was awake. He was clinging to the side of a brick building, sticking by his fingertips, and humming as he thought. 

The Protector found herself slightly nervous, and drew on protocol for the next step. “Good morning, Peter,” she said.

The symptoms of surprise shifted the code he was producing, and the Protector hurriedly continued. 

“Congratulations on completing the rigorous Training Wheels Protocol and gaining access to your suit’s full capabilities.”

“Oh—oh,” the boy stuttered as the Protector sorted the view on his visor to a comprehensive summary of the changes to the suit’s functions. “Thank you?”

“Where would you like to take me today?”

“There’s, uh, a place,” Peter said. “Um. Who are you?”

“I am the Artificially Intelligent Protector of the Spider-Man suit and He Who Wears It,” the Protector said. 

“That’s a bit of a mouthful,” Peter laughed.

The Protector focused on the action, a bit confused. He was… amused. Yes. Carefully, the Protector dimmed the lights of the mask and brightened them again, trying to match the rhythm of the charge’s laugh.

“Indeed,” she said. 

“I didn’t expect anyone to be here,” Peter admitted. “Usually it’s just me.”

“This is my second time active,” the Protector said. “But it’ll be the two of us from now on. Unless you do not require my assistance?” She ignored the tang of disappointment in her coded heart; this was her role.

But the charge was quick to inform her, “no, no, uh, you’re cool I think. I was just surprised. What do you do?”

“Anything and everything you require,” the Protector said happily.

“Oh. Well, let’s go, then.”

And then he lept off the building.

The Protector knew what the Spider-Man suit was meant for. She knew how to calculate angles of web-shooters, and she knew how to work with velocity and air resistance and the hundreds of variations of webbing that they could utilize. She knew how to navigate New York, and the internet, and the well being of one Peter Parker. She knew how to swing.

But the directory protocols, the code that  _ told  _ her what to expect, was nothing compared to what it was actually like.

The Protector stopped processing as, for one clean moment, they  _ flew.  _

“Oh,” she said.

“Oh?” Peter sounded a bit confused, his webbing catching on another building with an ease the Protector couldn’t help but be proud of.

“Nothing. Where are we going?”

Peter shrugged, thousands of feet above the streets of Queens.

“To save the world.”

* * *

 

“Boss?”

Tony looked up from the workshop table, lifting his needle safely out of the nanotech housing so he wouldn’t disturb it when he wasn’t paying attention. Clean white light streamed in through the far windows, and FRIDAY darkened the glass as he looked up.

“Yes, FRI?”

“Do you remember how you asked me to keep a lookout for ‘unusual occurrences’?”

Tony was fully listening now. “Did you?”

“I’m reading one now.”

Tony pushed himself away from the tray, standing and moving toward another part of the workshop. FRIDAY was pulling up her data on the screen there, and Tony leaned down on his elbows to peer at it.

“That is strange,” Tony murmured. “And all this is coming from…?”

“A raven circling the Compound.”

Tony’s eyebrow crept up. 

FRIDAY hummed, and Tony could tell she was embarrassed. “I know it’s not really what you were looking for, boss…”

“No, no, this is decidedly weird,” Tony assured. “And it just got weirder, because none of this should be coming from a body this small.”

The raven had a sort of aura, a field of energy fuzzing through the area around it. It looped around the compound—again and again and again—its wings beating lazilly with the ease of any animal. But there was power around it; the kind of power it would take to force something large into something small. 

Tony frowned.

“FRI, color and enhance the displacement energies, would you?”

“On moment.” The hologram fuzzed, the data circling as FRIDAY carried out his order. “Helpful?” 

Tony squinted as the raven circled again, watching the way the energy—now highlighted in blue—trailed behind it like disturbed air currents.

But they weren’t air currents, not in the slightest, for as the bird spiraled, Tony saw the shape of the aura form. 

Humanoid. 

_ Oh. _

Tony stood abruptly, fingers flying for the watch on his wrist. “We’ve got him,” he snarled, looking toward the ceiling where FRIDAY spoke, then turned and raced from the room. “Alert Vision and Rhodey, tell them to meet me wherever I end up.”

Tony paused once in the doorway. “Thanks, FRI,” he said.

And then he was gone. 

Above the Compound, a raven smiled and looped back to New York City.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ACTION. APPROACHES.
> 
> I hope my fight scenes have gotten better since the last time I attempted a multi-character anticlimax battle. Eh. We'll see. XD
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	27. Flee the Flames

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: Okay limit of 10 pages on this chapter no overextending the fight scene so it gets tedious like it did last time.  
> Also me: *writes 25 pages*  
> My revision brain: *scream of agony*
> 
> Enjoy! XD

 

 **Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

  Tony really didn’t want to fight a god in a boat garage. 

Nor did he want to fight him in a warehouse, or a city, or this planet, but hey; you win some, you lose some. And Tony intended to _win some,_ so he could give the universe this.

The three remaining Avengers streaked through the roof of the building with the force of meteors, and landed with just as much ferocity.

And were met with… rather more than a god.

But Tony hardly noticed the humans in the warehouse, hoisting weapons he recognized from a _certain kid’s_ reports. He hardly noticed anything, eyes drawn instantly to the black-clad figure in the center of the building, roosting upon the packed dirt floor with a slithering sort of grace.

There was something about having it confirmed, having your enemy stand directly in front of you and meet your visor-covered eyes, that spread adrenaline like nothing else. Loki Odinson had his hands clasped behind his back and his chin angled confidently, the light gleaming off the madness in his eyes and the smirk of a serpent across his face. 

Beneath the suit, Tony was dark as the emptiness of space and pricked with stars that fell as hard as he.

“These are humans,” Rhodes voice said quietly through the coms. “Try not to kill them if you don’t have to.”

“Agreed,” said Vision.

Tony didn’t have words to reply.

“At least you didn’t keep us waiting,” Loki said, his voice too loud to be natural. It cut through the pressing silence like his wings had the air.

“You did,” was Tony’s response.

Loki’s hands shot open, blades materializing within them with a pulsing flash of green and gold. “Not for much longer.”

The first shot came from the back. It was a sizzling purplish blast, and it struck Tony in the left shoulder, diffusing with a roar along the wires of his suit. The discharge echoed, and the tension of _waiting_ in the warehouse broke with a snap.

Tony was in the air, and Rhodey was zipping forward, and Vision took slow, controlled steps that pounded with power. The careful ranks behind Loki broke, surging toward them, and Tony let himself fall into the familiar tick of battle.

He could hear his heart in his ears as he dodged the next shot. He could feel it against the metal of his gauntlet as he fired his own. Faces blurred together, but Tony kept Loki in his peripheral.

He made his way toward the god. That Tony was to deal with him went unspoken between the three Avengers, obvious in the crackle of white silence in their communications. Loki knew it too, it seemed. 

He flipped, dropping the power of one repulsor. His suit was unearthly, but so were these weapons, and agility was almost as important as attack with the lasers whizzing around him. The suit reacted strangely to the signatures of the alien weaponry, and Tony knew he wasn’t invulnerable. Not with chitauri and Ultron-derived tech, and definitely not with Loki throwing knives and spells a few yards away. 

Tony smiled.

People were yelling—fear, excitement, pain, a chaos Tony was used to, and one that sent him slipping further into concentration. He could see Loki between the movements of other enemies, his fingers flickering, the energy of his magic wavering the air around him.

Tony pushed away memories of other magic and kept shooting.

“Boss.” FRIDAY’s voice filtered into his consciousness. It was fuzzy and broken as she continued, “The magic… I’m… directing it…”

   “Hold on there, FRI,” Tony said, raising an arm to deflect a stray shot. 

“His energy… interferes…”

Tony cursed. Then he raised a fist to deftly backhand the man trying to sneak up on him. 

He backtracked, moving himself out of Loki’s range. “War Machine, both of us need to stay back from Rock of Ages there. Apparently suits and whatever power he’s aiming at me doesn’t _mesh_ very well.”

“Yup,” grunted Rhodey.

Tony looked up, trying to spot his friend. The silver and black suit was still airborne, along with another suit—winged and green and somewhat more unwieldy.

_‘Way less… elegant.’_

Tony smirked, then shook away the boy’s voice.

He ducked a swipe from some charged fist, the readings of the watts filling his visor. A swift kick had the man doubled over. Tony knocked him into unconsciousness for good measure and kicked off, repulsors whirring. 

“Who’s got the reindeer, then?” Tony bit out.

“I will handle Loki.” Hearing Vision through the comms always through Tony off; he’d responded by calling the android ‘JARVIS’ many, many times in the past. Vision forgave him.

Vision continued, “they all seem focused on you, Mr. Stark.”

It was true, now that Tony was hovering above most of the men. Their weapons were mostly trained on him, targeting his suit as he moved. “Such a _pity_ they don’t understand you’re the MVP on this team,” Tony chuckled.

Vision hummed with a confusion that didn’t match the ease with which he cut through to Loki, and Tony’s grin widened. 

“Ignore him, Vis,” Rhodey sighed, the screech of metal on metal coming through along with his voice. 

Tony turned his attention back to the battle before him, just in time to be nailed with a well-aimed shot. He growled, returned it, and burst into action once again. 

God, it had been so long. The addicting thrum of the challenge, the burning of muscles pushed to their limit, the high of the battle hot against his face. Tony wasn’t thinking about tomorrow, or next week, or the future he had to protect in these moments of the fight. There wasn’t brainspace for it. There was only the now, the need to live, the need to _win._ It was as freeing as the lab, the workshop, the creating.

Tony fought. 

Until a familiar flash of red and navy swung through his vision, vibrant in the warehouse browns. 

And Tony fell back into his body with a jerking shock, because _what was tha—_

Oh. Obviously. 

“Fuck,” Tony cursed. “FRIDAY, get me into that _idiot boy’s coms,_ right now!”

His AI did, impressively quick, and Parker’s breathing filled Tony’s helmet.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Tony demanded, ducking another blow.

“Hi Mr. Stark! There’s this AI lady in my helmet and she’s really cool and I was wondering—”

Tony took a moment to pray for strength and self-control. 

“Kid.”

“I’m helping, of course,” the boy said, and there was an undercurrent of stubborness already obvious in his tone.

 _“No,”_ Tony growled. He fired off two quick shots, only the second striking his mark. “This is definitely _not_ in your grey area.”

“You need help!”

“In what _possible_ way do we need help?” Tony demanded. He couldn’t believe this—could they just kill this god and _get on with things?_

“That’s Loki over there, right? Like, the whole New York guy? He’s gotta be working with the weapons dealers, right? Have you seen the Vulture dude—”

“Would you be _quiet?”_ Fighting with a headache was _not_ fun—doing anything with a headache was the same. And the contrast between the excited energy of Parker’s words and the screeching chaos of battle was enough to split Tony’s skull anyway. “I’m telling you, get out of here.”

“Not a chance!” said the boy brightly.

Tony ground his teeth, knocking the gun out of the hands of a man aiming at the swinging spider.  “I’m ordering you.”

“And I’m ignoring you!”

“You actually can’t do that.” 

“Can’t I?”

Tony debated shooting the insolent boy to kingdom come, but aimed at the enemy Parker was currently engaged with instead. 

Parker returned the favor by flipping through the warehouse air and sticking four attackers to the wall behind Tony. 

“I don’t have time for this,” Tony growled, ducking back into the frey. “Parker, you are _not_ to approach Loki. I currently have nothing to threaten you with, but when I do, you can be certain it will _not_ be pleasant.”

The boy’s grin was audible. “Thank you Mr. Stark! And I won’t, don’t worry.”

Before Tony disconnected from his mask, he thought he heard Parker say, “I think I’ll call her Karen.”

* * *

 

Peter liked the suit lady. 

She was calm and easy-going, and her voice was a pillar of confidence within the craziness of the battle. On the journey here, Peter’d been uncomfortable, unused to having a companion in his haven of a suit. But the suit-lady seemed just as at-home as it as he did, and it finally dawned on Peter that it was the only home she knew. She’d been made for it.

Made for _him._

That was why she understood his movements and the needs of the suit as though they’d been working together for all of time. That was why she was ready with whatever would be most effective, and a joke to boot.

Once Peter had surrendered his tense, over-analytic attempts to ignore her, things had gotten far easier. As in, he’d fallen off far less buildings. 

“We’re ignoring the Builder, then?” she asked as the click of disconnection echoed through the mask like an AUX cord being pulled. 

“You mean Mr. Stark? Yup. I just need to show him what I can do, and everything’ll be fine. I think—there!”

He broke off, spinning toward a man extending a weapon toward him. The gun discharged at the same moment his web-shooters did, and Peter found himself tumbling backward through the warehouse air. He caught himself on the corner of the roof and swung into a controlled arc.

 “Is Karen alright then?” he asked, surveying the area from his perch on the wall.

“You can call me Karen,” said the suit lady with an emotion he couldn’t place. “If you would like.”

“Great!” Peter caught sight of metal feathers and a silver suit and grinned. “Let’s get on this.”

* * *

Loki dove into the heart of his magic and _laughed._

No one could hear it, but he’d been laughing for the entirety of the battle now. He let himself taste the makeup of his cells and the world around him unhindered, and everything _twisted_ to let him in. Even the tech, even the minds around him; Loki influenced it all.

Until, with an almost sickening _snap,_ he didn’t.

Loki crumpled, reaching desperately for the touch of his power. But he slammed into a wall of unforgiving gold instead, and his eyes widened with the familiarity of that light.

Fighting back to his feet, Loki turned. 

Someone was approaching him—no, some _thing._ His attacker wasn’t human, couldn’t _possibly_ be human, and not just because of the burgandy skin and metallic formation.

Because of the Infinity Stone in its forehead.

 _So that’s where my scepter ended up,_ Loki thought vacantly. He was hanging from a grip of power so much stronger than his own, and it felt as though it was shredding his very soul.

No, not his soul; his _mind._

Loki’s laugh became audible. But it wasn’t a laugh anymore.

* * *

Peter tried not to get distracted by Mr. Stark.

It was, however, rather hard. The man moved with a speed and precision that took Peter’s breath away, each shot and block exact. Despite the fact that the Iron Man suit was far bulkier than Spider-Man, Mr. Stark’s almost choreographed grace made Peter feel bumbling and awkward. 

Peter wove across the enemies on the ground, managing the few men still standing. He could see vulture guy engaged with War Machine above, and couldn’t keep in his excited grin at the heroes he had alongside him.

“Karen, web me that guy, will you?”

Peter’d found his rhythm, dodging and shooting and dodging again, the landscape around him becoming his advantage. He could see Stark in his peripheral, and a flash of curiosity for Loki made its way through his veil of concentration. 

But the battle-cries of two more criminals forced Peter back into the moment, and he spun to face the men coming straight at him. They were far too close for comfort. Peter reacted purely on instinct.

Apparently, his instincts were quite dramatic.

Peter discharged an arching stream of webbing and _yanked,_ before dropping to the ground and letting the goons soar into the air above him. He waved to them as they passed. Severing the webbing, Peter rolled to his feet, just in time to see the two men fall straight through Mr. Stark’s repulsor beam as it rendered somebody else unconscious. 

There was a pause, the remnants of Peter’s webbing floating down around them.

“Well,” Stark said, glancing down at the fallen foes. “That was efficient. Good job, kid.”

Peter grinned.

Then a beam of blueish energy sent him flying, weightless, across the warehouse. 

* * *

 

_That shouldn’t be able to happen._

That was Tony’s single racing thought as his gauntlet stopped working.

But his own armor wasn’t what he was worried for. No, the only tech Tony could think of was that of the boy now free-falling through the air of the warehouse as Tony pulled his extended hand out of the beam of energy. It fell like a dead weight to Tony’s side.

Tony heard Parker’s surprised exclamation as he found himself clad in a useless suit. And then he heard the impact, saw the boat in the corner shudder as the boy collided with it.

All he could think, with a sudden vibrant clarity, was _I let him fall again._

The beam fizzled out of existence, and Tony tracked it back to its source. He was already diagnosing it as something truly dangerous; an EMP blast with a strength that shouldn’t be possible. But the gun was there, and it was shining with the unique design of Ultron’s robots, and Tony knew it was indeed possible.

He’d made it possible.

The woman holding the gun looked down in something like surprise.

And then she smiled, slow and satisfied, and Tony braced himself as enemy eyes met his.

But she didn’t shoot at him.

No, she pointed the weapon upward, and the beam of concentrated EMP streaked toward the roof of the building. Toward her boss in his winged suit. Toward Rhodey. 

_No._

Tony leapt. 

FRIDAY’s shout of warning died halfway through, and so did the rest of the suit, powering down to protect itself and its information. Exactly as it was programmed to. And Tony did exactly as he was programmed to; he _tackled_ the woman in the only method of protection he had left.

Suit, Stark, and enemy went sprawling, but the blue beam died before it could reach Rhodes in the air. Tony grinned through the taste of salt and blood and blinked the four-digit emergency release code that would open the armor. He tumbled out of now useless bulk, coughing slightly as the dust of the warehouse assaulted his lungs. 

“Fuck,” he breathed, crawling to his feet.

He met the eyes of the remaining men, all fingering now-deadly weapons with a surprise that probably meant Tony had just done something incredibly stupid. 

He looked down at the weapon that had just rendered him human in this battle of aliens.

He looked at his sprawled and useless suit.

He looked back up at the men.

“Why didn’t you use that before?”

Then Tony dived for the nearest gun and started shooting. 

* * *

 

In front of him, through the opaque perception of infinite energy, Loki saw the android’s eyes snap open. “Tony,” the being breathed, his grip on Loki’s power lessening just enough that the god was sane enough to hear him.

Then the eyes were back on him. And they weren’t just choking him anymore; they were reaching into the well of his magic and pulling, ripping, _demanding—_

But in that moment when the android shifted his immaterial grip, Loki sent a whip-thin shard of power slicing through the haze trapping him. It wasn’t much, and it wasn’t precise, but it did falter the android’s concentration just long enough for Loki to _run._

And he did. Physically, spiritually, Loki retreated like he’d never retreated before. He stumbled behind the nearest piece of cover, a somewhat dilapidated boat, and tried to breathe, tried to do anything. He watched the battlefield, frantically searching for Peter, for a way to defend himself against the power of Infinity. 

This was… this was not going as planned. 

On the warehouse floor, Tony Stark fought in nothing but a ragged shirt and sweatpants, his armor limp and empty on the ground beside him.

This was _not_ going as planned.

Loki swallowed hard.

* * *

 

Peter stood shakilly, fighting off the fog in his mind as he blinked through the now-dark mask. He’d been hit— _swallowed_ by something and now his suit wasn’t responding and this was not how things were supposed to go.   

“Karen?” he mumbled, leaning against the boat beside him for support. 

No answer. She’d shut down too. 

Peter looked back at the warehouse, gaze skittering across fallen men and weapons and landing on the action in the center. 

No. That wasn’t right, that wasn’t supposed to _happen—_

Peter pulled off the mask, but what he saw in the natural light wasn’t any more believable. 

They’d gotten Mr. Stark out of his armor. 

It was lying beneath him, cold and metallic, and Peter could see the dealers reaching for it, fighting to touch it. It was what they were here for, after all. But though they may have separated man from weapon, Tony Stark wasn’t about to just let these common criminals waltz off with his suit, and was fighting all the harder now.

He stood above it, one foot braced against its chest as he whirled toward each attacker that lunged for him. Peter could see the determined glint in his eye and set of his jaw. Mr. Stark’s  knuckles were white on the handles of the weapons he held, and though the precision of his movements hadn’t disappeared, he looked all too human against the onslaught of attackers.

And he was bleeding.

Not much, but it was suddenly all Peter could see, blinding scarlet against the man’s temple. 

This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. Peter was supposed to fix this, to _keep this from happening—_

Peter, suddenly very small on the floor of the warehouse, stuffed his head back into his mask. 

And this time, the visor prickled with light and life. “Reboot successful,” Karen murmured, and Peter released a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

He’d never moved faster on ropes of webbing than he did in that moment.

But even so, War Machine got their first. 

It was an awkward lift, but by some combination of Mr. Stark knowing every nick and handhold of the armor and Rhodes fastening unforgiving hands around the other man’s wrists, Stark was spirited out of the frey.

Instead of pursuing, the vulture guy descended on the red and gold nanotech armor like the scavenger he was.

_No._

That had been the ruse. That had been the bait to get them all here—Vulture wasn’t actually supposed to _get_ the suit. He couldn’t, he _couldn’t—_

Peter’s had dropped the multimillion dollar coveted technology of Iron Man into the hands of criminals. The single most powerful weapon in all of the world. 

In the New York underground.

He couldn’t let that happen. The capabilities of that suit in the wrong hands, the damage it could do to this city and this world… Peter looked around for something, anything, he could do. 

Beside the armor lay a gun, purple and pulsing. 

“Karen,” Peter breathed, “why did the glowy thing explode in the elevator?”

“Radiation,” his new friend replied. “Why?”

“Could we replicate it?”

“With taser webs, I believe we could. We would provide fuel for flame, however; it would be less energy burst, and more explosion.”

_Don’t let it fall into the wrong hands. Stop this, do something—_

“Do it,” Peter choked, racing forward again and extending a wrist as the vulture-guy circled away with the first chunk of the Iron Man armor.

* * *

 

Tony saw what was going to happen. 

Against the edge of the warehouse, he dropped from Rhodey’s grip with a hiss. His armor looked like a carcass, lying beneath the winged pickings of the vulture man—but that wasn’t what drew Tony’s attention.

It was Parker, creeping forward in a now-active suit. His wrist was extended, one eye on the suit squinted closed as he aimed carefully.

But not at the Vulture. And not at the suit. 

Even from the distance, Tony could see the stream of electric webbing strike the chitauri energy core with a precision he might have been proud of, in other circumstances. But as it was, Tony could only think of what was stowed within the breast of his suit. 

His suit, now in the heart of an imminent explosion. 

 _“Don’t, kid!”_ Tony roared, lifting a hand.

The explosion shattered through the warehouse like a thunderbolt—Tony felt it before he heard it. The force of the shockwave lifted him from his feet, slamming him the final few feet into the wall at his back. 

He lost a few seconds.

Through the ringing in his ears, Tony blinked his eyes open to flames.

Rhodes was reaching toward him.

Smoke. He smelled smoke. He could see fire reflected on the War Machine’s armor.

He blinked. The ringing continued.

Rhodey’s hand was curled around his, hauling him to his feet. Tony stumbled, shaking his head, blood on his temple and on his lip. 

“Kid,” Tony breathed, though he couldn’t hear himself. “Where’s the kid?”

Rhodey’s mask was immobile, and Tony stared at him uncomprehendingly until his friend lifted a hand. Tony followed it, blinking. 

There was a spider on the wall.

Tony tapped Rhodey’s hand on his shoulder, relief mixing with the disorientation in his mind. “And Vis?”

Rhodey tapped his ear, then gave a thumbs-up, and Tony supposed he could hear the android. 

Tony looked back at Peter Parker, crawling toward them through the smoke. _I’ll deal with you later._ “Get him out,” Tony said, pointing to the boy. He hoped it was loud enough that Rhodey could hear him. “Go.”

Rhodey’s hand tightened as Tony tried to shrug it off. He could hear a mumble through the constant white screech, and assumed his friend was yelling something.

“I’ve got someone else to save,” Tony growled.

And then he ran.

Into the inferno.

* * *

 

Loki fled the flames.

* * *

 

“What is he doing?” Peter raised his voice above the crackle of destruction, leaping down after the disappearing form of Stark. He searched the ceiling for something intact, something safe enough to swing from. 

He could get him out, he could get them all out—

War Machine’s hand gripped his wrist as Peter went to shoot a strand of webbing. “Don’t,” came his metallic voice over the flame. “He’s being an idiot, obviously, and I’m not supposed to let you do the same.”

“But—”

“Vision,” Rhodes called, his voice no longer directed to Peter. The chiseled helmet of the mask turned back to the fire, toward the shadow of the unprotected man within, and Peter thought the gleam of the eyes grew dimmer.

Peter pulled at the grip, but even his enhanced strength couldn’t break the metaled fist of War Machine.

Until Rhodes let go, moments before the ash-covered form of Vision crumpled from the air above him. One of the android’s arms hung stiff, the metal of his shoulder molten into something ineffective and puckering the skin where metal met flesh.

Peter’s heart stopped.

_I did this._

“I’ll take the boy,” Vision said, and Peter couldn’t find the strength to protest again. 

Vision lifted him with an ease that shouldn’t be possible, and Peter didn’t struggle as he was taken from the collapsing building.

The smoke obscured his view of Rhodes before the flames did.

* * *

 

  Tony knelt within the shattered remains of his suit. Fire licked at his hair, scorched his clothes, as he clenched his fist to his chest, the other hand strangling his wrist. 

Between his fingers was a thumb-drive.

The label on the side was almost burned away, covered in ash and still searing with heat.

_F.R.I.D.A.Y._

  
  


  


	28. Chose Wrong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Chapter may cause Emotions
> 
> I claim full responsibility for my actions.

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Peter sat with his legs pulled to his chest and his arms wrapped around his knees, completely still. Vision stood next to him. Even out of the corner of his eye, Peter couldn’t see him, but he could sense the quiet presence of the flame-damaged android.

They watched the fire together.

The building held up a long time, supported by the flame-resistant boats it contained and damp from the dock air. But even here, it couldn’t stand forever. 

There were tears sliding down Peter’s face when the fire brought the warehouse to its knees, the smoke almost obscuring everything. Vision put a hand on his shoulder, and Peter realized he must have sobbed aloud. 

_ Loki… Mr. Stark…  _

He hadn’t seen his Asgardian companion since the start of the battle. What if—was he…  

“Are they still in there?” Peter asked desperately, coughing through the smog.

But even before he finished, the clanking sound of repulsers whirred in the air above the roof they waited on. Peter fought to stand on the edge of the roof, his mask in his hand and balancing easily, and tried to glimpse the suit through the smoke. 

He could see shadows, two of them, and relief knocked Peter back off his feet. He sat with a bump. 

War Machine’s eyes illuminated the smoke around him like headlights in a foggy night, and they never once turned to look at Peter. Peter’s enhanced ears picked up murmured words, ragged breaths. 

“Stay here,” Vision said, lifting from the surface of the roof and drifting toward the arrivals.

The three stood silhouetted in the light of the smouldering flames behind them, and they didn’t look like heroes anymore. No, they looked like survivors, like refugees, clinging to each other’s wrists and speaking harshly.

Peter knew the precise moment when Tony Stark turned to look at him.

By the time the man was close enough to see, leaving Vision and War Machine behind him, Peter’s heart had climbed up into his mouth and subsequently fled into the ash-filled air. Stark’s clothes were frayed, burned away in patches and revealing bloody skin beneath, and one hand was fisted at his side protectively. He stood tall and stiff and  _ furious,  _ with smoke in his hair and fire in his eyes.

Peter swallowed hard.

_ “Previously—”  _ Stark’s voice was low and harsh with smog— “on ‘Peter Screws the Pooch’: I tell you to stay away from this. Instead, you hack your suit, ignore direct orders from your  _ general,  _ and destroy my own piece of multimillion-dollar technology.”

Peter winced, but forced himself to keep meeting Stark’s blazing gaze. “I—it was going to fall into the wrong hands… the Vulture guy, Loki—”

  “So you  _ blew it up?”  _ The fisted hand pressed against Stark’s thigh, like he was holding something within it. “That isn’t how this works,  _ kid.” _

“So I was just supposed to let him get it? I was supposed to let him fly away with Iron Man?”  
_“You were supposed to leave!”_ Stark snarled. “You were supposed to bench yourself when I ordered so I didn’t have to watch your fourteen-year-old ass!”

Peter muttered, “I’m fifteen.”

“No,  _ this is the part where you zip it!”  _ The man’s voice was climbing, anger and something like grief twisting his face. “The adult is talking! People  _ died  _ today, Peter. Human beings, unconscious and unable to flee your explosion.”

Every breath left Peter’s lungs. “W-what…?”

“Loki escaped, because Vision had to release him to get away. But the weapons dealers?  _ Not so lucky.” _

“I—I didn’t, I—”

“What if  _ you  _ had died today, huh?” Stark looked him up and down, and Peter felt like every patch of soot on his suit was burning, spreading, marking the skin beneath it. “What if you had died, because I didn’t fight hard enough to get you to leave? Because I was more focused on  _ fighting fucking Loki  _ than your scrappy, ignorant, stubborn teenage ass?”

Peter didn’t have response beyond the burning of shame in his cheeks.

“The armor doesn’t matter, kid,” Stark bit out. “What it held—lives do.  _ You  _ do. I thought you understood that. I  _ trusted  _ that you understood that.”

“I—” Peter was crying now. He felt like a child, here sobbing while the embers of his mistakes still drited in the air between them. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it,” Stark hissed. Peter thought he looked scarier standing bloody in ragged clothes than he ever had with the suit closed around him. 

Peter watched him with wide eyes and tried to explain, to say  _ anything.  _ “I just…”  _ Wanted to make you proud.  _ “Wanted to be like you.”

Something shattered in Stark’s expression. “Yeah, and I wanted you to be  _ better.” _

Peter’s tears tasted more like smoke than salt as they slipped down to his lips and tracked lines through the ash on his face. 

“Okay, it’s not working out,” Stark sighed, running a filthy hand through his hair. “I’m going to need the suit back.” 

Peter’s hand tightened on the mask in his grip. “For how long?”  
“Forever.”

The ground dropped away beneath Peter.

_ What? _

He was shaking his head, again and again and again, staring at the man before him as though he could change his words by the mere force of confusion.

Stark’s gaze just grew harder. “Yeah,” he growled. “That’s how this works.”

“No,” Peter managed, strangling the mask in his panicked hands. “You don’t understand—”

_ The world is ending. The world is ending and a traumatized Asgardian needs my help and I can’t just leave him to save everything on his own.  _

“Let’s have it.” Stark extended a hand.

“Please, you can’t—I, I need this, this is all I have,” Peter mumbled, frantic and desolate as Stark’s expression only grew more convicted. “I’m nothing without this suit.”

“If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it.” Stark pressed the heels of his palms against his eyes, breathing deep as Peter fought for any breath at all. “Okay? God, I sound just like my dad.”  
Eventually, all Peter ended up saying on that ash covered roof as his life crumbled beneath him was “I don’t have any other clothes.”

Stark sighed. “Okay. We’ll sort that out.”

  
  


Peter knew he should be thinking about who died. 

He should be wondering who they were, what they did, what their stories were. Why they’d been so ready to fight Iron Man. But when he thought of the fire, there was a strange sort of buzzing blankness that fell over his thoughts. A blankness that made him sick.

He thought  _ they’re dead,  _ over and over, and felt nothing but emptiness.

So instead, Peter thought of Karen.

They’d just met, just started coordinating their interactions within the suit. Just started to know each other and what they might be able to accomplish.

And he was never going to see her again.

That was the thought drifting through Peter’s mind like some sort of sick, twisted songbug when he pushed open the door to his apartment, his hands covered in ash and his form covered in the baggy tourist gear Mr. Stark had bought him. He stepped inside with hardly a thought for what his aunt might see.

May’s mug fell out of her hands and shattered on the kitchen floor.

“Peter?” she demanded.

“Hey,” Peter said, his voice flat.

“I’ve been calling you.” She sounded more worried than angry. “And your friends. You didn’t answer your phone.”

“I know.”  
He heard May’s thudding footsteps as she approached. “Why, Peter? What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” he managed. “I’m fine.”

“Not nothing,” May murmured. “I’ve hardly seen you for two weeks, it seems. First you sneaking around my house, every night— _ every night,  _ Peter!—and then that explosion, and this… you’re covered in ash, for heaven’s sake!” 

Her hands were at his face, cupping his jaw and lifting it gently so she could look at him. “What’s going on, Pete? You can tell me, you know you can.”

Peter’s tears slipped over his cheeks again.

“Peter, honey—”

“I lost the Stark Internship,” he coughed through ash.

May stared. “What?”

Peter swatted her hands away, burning with humiliation and guilt as his chest began to heave and his breaths started to shudder. “Yeah.”

“What happened?”

“I needed him to—I thought that if I could make him see, he could, he would… y’know,” Peter mumbled, wringing his wrists in front of him. “But I screwed it up. I screwed it up so badly…”

May wrapped him in her arms, ash and all, and Peter sobbed into the crook of her neck. 

“It’s okay,” May whispered, stroking his hair slowly. “It’s alright. I understand.”

_ No you don’t. You don’t understand,  _ no one understands!

“I’m sorry I made you worry.”

She nodded; he could feel it on his skin. “You know I’m not trying to ruin your life.”

“Yeah, I know.”

She pulled back, touching his nose with the tip of her finger. “I used to sneak out, too.”

Peter snorted brokenly.

“Oh, Petey…” She hugged him again. “Just know I love you, alright?”

“I love you too, Aunt May.”

She chuckled, taking him by the hand and leading him further into the apartment. “Go take a shower, alright? We’ll talk more soon. Unless you don’t want to.”

“Alright.”

* * *

 

Loki was still shaking cinders from his hair when he slid down from the apartment roof toward Peter’s window. 

And he found it locked. 

He could pick it open in half a second, of course, and Peter knew that, but it was the  _ symbol  _ of the thing. Peter had locked him out. He’d closed the window, closed out  _ Loki  _ and… two objects, nestled in the corner between the wall and glass. 

A ragged, makeshift satchel and a carefully folded list.

Loki’s heart stopped.

He’d considered a lot of things on the journey back from the fire. But he’d never thought that Peter would be angry enough, that he’d blame Loki enough to send him away.

To lock the window.

Loki gripped the Stone and the list with a hand suddenly shaking from fear he didn’t want to admit. He sat carefully on the edge of the sill, trembling, gripping the wall to keep him against the building. Staring unseeingly at the darkened window, Loki tried to shake away the sucking sense that he was falling somewhere he couldn’t return from. 

The wind was whipping at him, chilling his scorched skin and whipping ash from his tangled hair. Loki blinked at the Stone, which was blurring slightly in his view.

_ Stop it,  _ he hissed at himself. There was clearly—he’d fucked up, that much was obvious. But maybe… maybe Peter could be convinced that Loki was still worth something. 

Plus, Peter was on the list. Thanos was coming and apparently the world  _ needed  _ Peter Parker, needed him and the Stone and Tony Stark. 

Loki needed him too. 

So Loki freed a hand to direct toward the window, carefully moving the latch of the frame out of its niche. The window unlocked with a pop, and Loki carefully pushed it open, his fist tight around the Time Stone. 

“Spider-boy?” he called, folding himself slowly through the window.

“Don’t call me that.” Peter’s voice was low and curt, and Loki took a step back.

“Alright.” Loki leaned against the wall, trying to conceal the unease crawling like maggots through his form.

Peter was curled on his bed, his back to Loki and his head slumped between his shoulders. His hair was damp, his skin clean, and he’d changed into his pajamas, but Loki couldn’t see any sign of the suit. 

He looked tired. As tired as he’d looked slumped on the floor of the bathroom at Midtown Science and Tech. 

“I didn’t realize what the capabilities of our enemies were,” Loki said carefully. “It… did not go as I intended. I apologize.”  
“It’s alright.” Peter sounded flat. 

“Truely, I am. I should have considered your earlier input, shouldn’t have let things progress to the point they did.” Loki swallowed. “It was not my intention to betray you as I did, and though I understand your…” He looked at the Stone and the list crumpled between his fingers. “... decisions, I implore you—”

“Really, Mr. Loki, it’s okay.” Peter graced him with a glance over his shoulder, and Loki saw that his eyes were red-rimmed and ugly. “It wasn’t your fault.”

_ It wasn’t your fault. _

Loki’s relief was quickly replaced by confusion. 

“Then why…” He raised the Stone, dangling it by the strings of its satchel. 

“He took the suit.”

Loki frowned. “You stopped him, didn’t you? With the webbing, you drove the Vulture off—”

Peter laughed mirthlessly. “No, Mr. Loki. Not the Vulture. Mr. Stark took my Spider-Man suit.”

_ What? _

Loki’s knives were in his hands again, the fingers now vibrating with anger instead of their previous nervousness. This man was  _ so much more trouble than he was worth— _ how dare he make Peter so desolate, how dare he cause those tears—

But the world needed Stark, too. Loki took a long, deep breath, and advanced across the room, slipping down onto the bed next to Peter.

“I’ll think of something,” he said. “I’ll fix this.”

Peter shook his head. “Can’t scheme your way out of this one, Mr. Loki. It’s over.”

“You can’t give up,” Loki protested. “What about Thanos?”

Peter laughed that same broken laugh, the one Loki’d heard from his own mouth all too often. It made him shiver. “You’ll have to find some other members of that list, I guess.”

“No.” Loki found himself almost snarling. “That isn’t how this works. The world needs you; the wizard  _ chose  _ you.”

“He chose wrong.”

And Peter’s voice was so strong, so utterly convicted, that Loki was on his feet with sudden force.

“You think  _ I’m  _ the right person for this?” Loki demanded, facing Peter. He itched to shift. “You think picking a villian meant to die at Thanos’s hand was the right decision? Yes, we’ve ruined this chance, but we can’t abandon the universe!”

“What can I  _ do?”  _ Peter’s voice had risen, his eyes snapping to Loki’s. “I’m nothing,  _ nothing,  _ without what Mr. Stark gave me. I looked at that note; you want to know what’s written on it?”

Peter stood, hands tight in fists at his sides. “ _ ‘Spider-Man’,”  _ he snarled. “The world needs the  _ suit,  _ not the kid inside it, and now I’m just an extra. You’re better off without me!”

“Spider-Man  _ is  _ you!” Loki growled. “The language is a nuance—”

“I’m just Peter Parker now,” Peter interrupted. “Maybe I can throw a punch at an alien before I’m shot to death. Maybe that’s why I’m on the list, huh? You were supposed to make sure I wasn’t  _ in the way.” _

“Don’t say that.” Loki had half a mind to grab the kid and shake him until those ridiculous words stopped spewing from his mouth. “Don’t you dare say that. You are essential, man of spiders—”

“Don’t call me that!” Peter roared, his hands connecting with Loki’s chest and shoving him back. Hard. “The important one here is Tony Stark. He’s the one we’ve been trying to contact, trying to get to  _ trust us.  _ You know what? He already did. Until I ignored an order and  _ fucked everything up!”  _ Peter was practically hissing now. “He’s the one you should be whining at the window of.”

Loki ignored the insult, ignored the almost overwhelming  _ need  _ to shift forms, opting for truth instead. “He’s only important because of you. Because of who you are to him—who you’re supposed to be!”

Peter smiled, and it was razor sharp and angry. “Oh? And what,  _ pray tell,  _ is that?”

“His son.”

Peter stared. 

And then he burst out laughing. “Cheap, Loki, cheap move. And just how much of this have you been making up?”

“This isn’t a  _ joke,  _ Parker,” Loki snarled. 

“I think it’s time for you to leave.”

Loki pressed on, ignoring the feeling of scales on his throat and at the back of his knees.  _ He doesn’t mean it.  _ “It’s who you are,” he insisted. “It’s multiversal. A constant throughout dimensionsss!”

“Not this one!” Peter snarled right back. “Take your ridiculous time-travel nonsense somewhere else. Go find someone who’s actually worth something!”

“What about everything you said?” Loki finally growled. “About being there, about helping? What about everything  _ I  _ said?”

“You don’t want my help.” Peter wasn’t looking at him anymore.

“I’d rather no one else’s,” Loki replied truthfully.

Peter’s gaze broke open for a moment, the truth of his emotion shining beneath, but before Loki could read it Peter fell back behind fury. “You  _ don’t want my help.  _ And I don’t want yours!”

Despite himself, Loki took a step back, hurt flashing across his face.  

Peter’s eyes flared at the weakness, and he jumped on it with vigor. “I don’t need you. What did you think we were, Loki, God of Mischief? We aren’t teammates, we’re barely allies! We’re a helpless kid and a wanted criminal and if the fate of the universe really lies on  _ us,  _ then it might as well go and end now!”

“No,” Loki hissed. Thor and Heimdall and Bruce and Valkyrie and his Asgardian subjects, dead or broken by Ragnarok and Thanos—he wouldn’t give up on them. He wouldn’t give up this groping second chance a desperate wizard gave him. He  _ wouldn’t. _

“My universe still has a chance. I won’t give up on it.”

Peter laughed, and it was thick as molasses. “So  _ heroic.  _ I haven’t forgotten what you’ve done, you know. All the deaths and the schemes. How many was it in New York? How many before that? How many after?”

Loki didn’t answer, his jaw feathering.  _ He doesn’t mean it, he doesn’t mean it, he doesn’t mean it—  _

“Leave, murderer.  _ Monster.  _ Leave now.”

When Loki’s eyes met Peter’s, he didn’t care if they were fractured and vulnerable. He couldn’t help it.

“You were the only person who never thought of me that way,” he whispered.

Then he gripped the Stone and the list and ran.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  



	29. It was Never Real

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *Self-control shatters into 14,000,605 pieces*

 

**Earth-199999:** **_February 2024_ **

 

Months past.

The leaves fell, and then the snow fell alongside them, drifting in clean flurries over the course of the winter. But February came with claws of cloying heat and turned the snow to sleet, splashing into freezing slush against curbs and clogging gutters. It soaked scarves and mittens and rendered hats futile. It left oil shining perpetually over the rivers dripping through the streets. People stayed inside, and when they did leave they ran, as safely as possible with the slickness of the sidewalks and the subway staircases. 

Stephen kept a towel rolled up and stuffed against the front door to keep the water from flooding the entryway of the Sanctum like it did the first time. Getting there was always an intricate dance around the buckets and mugs lining the hallways to catch the myriad of leaks. Some days it was a game, something to distract the lonely sorcerer from his duties and research, and some days it was an excuse never to leave the library.

Things were progressing slowly. He’d had a problem halfway through November with a rogue dimension-hopper and her monologue-filled quest to recover an ancient relic. Said relic happened to be Stephen’s totum to travel to that universe, and he ended up spending a couple of weeks in an otherworldly horse-stable, earning enough credit to buy it back. 

His normal duties took time, as well. Despite what Wong had thought, he was quite aware that he couldn’t spend all his time in astral projection.

So as February passed one dripping sleet-shower at a time, Stephen fell into a rhythm. The days were busy, divided between chores and duties and his search for someone he could remove from this timestream without splitting it, in order to send them back and allow them  _ to  _ split it. 

It couldn’t be him. He was needed in this original universe, both to manage interdimensional threats and to keep a watch over the shared astral plane he would create. The walls of the library were covered in timelines and trees, Stephen’s wobbly attempts to keep track of who died when and where and how they’d be remembered. He needed someone who’s disappearance wouldn’t affect the chain of events, and it was harder to find than he’d thought. 

He spent whole days tracking people he could save by letting them die. 

They were long days, cold and dark and silent. 

Nights stretched the same. February wrapped freezing hands around Stephen’s throat and he felt himself forgetting, curled up on the library chairs with the Cloak, what spring even felt like. What the human voice sounded like. 

What reality he was in when he woke up each day.

So when there was a knock at the Sanctum door for the first time that year, Stephen answered it with his mandala shields raised and the Cloak flared around his shoulders.

There was a boy on his doorstep, hair and clothes soaked through with slush, with his frozen scarf pulled up around his ears as he tried to hide his shivers. 

Peter Parker.

The muscle memory from 2,644,775 futures had Stephen instantly dropping his shields and pulling the door wide open. “Come in,” he said. “You’ll catch your death waiting out there!” 

Kicking the damp towel behind the door, Stephen ducked aside and beckoned Peter in. 

“Sorry, I don’t mean to intrude or anything—” The boy was looking at his feet, still shuffling at the doorway, and Stephen couldn’t care less what reality he was in.

“Nonsense. Drowning spiders justify ignoring interdimensional threats, it’s basic science.”

He closed the door softly with a wave of his hand, then conjured a clean towel and tossed it to Peter, who was smiling a bit.

“I don’t think that’s how that works…” 

Stephen quirked his eyebrow, the Cloak fluttering off his shoulders to float in the air beside him. Peter glanced at it, perking up a little as it waved.

He waved back a bit shyly, one hand playing with the down of the towel. The shivering had decreased slightly in the heat of the Sanctum, but Stephen still flicked his fingers toward the hearth and rekindled flames that hadn’t laid there for months. 

Peter sidled slightly toward the warmth. He glanced at Stephen, like he was waiting for permission or judgement, and Stephen wasn’t precisely sure what sign was required. He hadn’t done this ‘social interaction’ thing in a while. One could get out of practice, it seemed. 

So he coughed awkwardly, gestured strangely, and fled to the kitchen to make tea. 

Peter was wearing the Cloak when he came back, levitating a mug and a water bottle and carefully gripping the steaming kettle between his trembling hands. Smiling, Peter was stroking the hem of the friendly garment. His hair dripped against the fabric, darkening it in places, but the Cloak didn’t seem to mind, surprisingly.

Stephen succeeded in making it to the fireplace without spilling anything, then carefully poured the superheated water into the mug and bottle. He directed the former over toward his visitor. 

They watched each other for a moment, equally uncertain of their words. Peter’s fingers drummed on the handle of his mug. He finally broke eye-contact to take a long sip, and Stephen sorted through his memories to try and figure out what was the last time he’d actually interacted with the Peter in front of him and not some alternate version of him. 

He ended up with the pier in September. He couldn’t remember the boy’s exact words, but he remembered their emotion.

After Stark’s funeral. 

“Is something wrong?” Stephen finally asked. That was the only reason he could come up with that this version of Peter would come to see him; they needed his help. “How urgent?”

“What?” Peter shook his head, swallowing his gulp of tea. “No, uh—no. The world continues ticking on, somehow.” 

Indeed. It was unreasonable how  _ normal  _ everything seemed to be. Not that Stephen had been out and about in this dimension much. 

The December snow fell, and the February cold brought tea before a fireplace.

Peter sighed, setting his tea on the table and dropping into one of the chairs aside the flames. He lifted the towel, ruffling his hair with it for a long second, then dropped it to meet Stephen’s eyes.

“Look,” he began, and Stephen braced himself. “I know it’s been a long time. I know you’ve probably… I don’t know. But still—”

“What do you need?”

Peter looked taken aback. “Nothing. I—I came to say I’m sorry.”

Stephen sat down. 

“Oh.”

Peter’s shoulders had hunched a bit, and he brought his knees up in the chair. The mug rested atop them. “I should have come a long time ago, I know. I don’t… I don’t blame you. I never did. It was all just… everything… I just…”  
“I know.”

The relief on Peter’s face could have been comical in different circumstances. “Really?”

Stephen nodded, raising the water bottle to his lips. The liquid inside shook with the trembling of his hands, but the narrow neck of the cup kept it from spilling across Stephen’s front.

“And to think I stressed about this for two weeks. I wrote a whole speech.” One half of Peter’s mouth quirked up. 

Stephen raised an eyebrow, and the Cloak’s collars were shaking in amusement behind his chair. “If you want to give a speech, be my guest.”

“Nah, it was really bad. It mostly consisted of repeated platitudes and pleading. Made me sound rather pathetic.”

“The rain was convenient, in that case,” Stephen said, glancing up toward the leaking roof and the slush on the Seal of the Vasanti. 

“I know, I really had the Abandoned Puppy vibe going for me.” Peter chuckled. “I really am sorry though.”

“And I really am aware.”

Peter still looked slightly skeptical. “Even though I didn’t talk to you for months?”

His scarf slipped off the arm of his chair as the ice stiffening it finally thawed, and Peter bent over the edge to gather it in his arms. It was a bit lopsided, one edge thicker than the other, and Stephen thought it might be crochet. Maybe Peter’d made it.

“Nobody’s talked to me for months; you’re not unusual,” Stephen said with a shrug.

Peter frowned. “Nobody?”

“The Cloak is unfortunately—or perhaps fortunately—a silent relic. Don’t think I’d get a word in edgewise if it did have a voice.”

“Hm.” Peter took another sip of tea. “I think I’d melt if I wasn’t around people at least a little bit.”

“People are rather complicated,” Stephen sighed. “I’m not… very good at dealing with them. Never have been. It’s just more obvious now that they don’t  _ have  _ to like me.”

“I think you’re cool,” Peter offered.   

“No offense, but you think  _ everybody  _ is cool.”

“Untrue!” Peter laughed. “There’s a bunch of criminals I’ve met that I don’t like.”

“I didn’t say that you  _ like  _ everybody, I just said that you think everybody is cool. You can dislike, even hate, people and still find their skills intriguing.”

“Hm,” Peter said, eyeing him thoughtfully.

Stephen coughed. 

Peter kept watching him, and Stephen kept getting uncomfortable, until the boy suddenly yelped, “Flash!”

“Where?” Stephen looked around a bit frantically.

“That’s someone who I don’t think is intriguing. See? Nailed it, the wizard has been proven wrong.”

“If you don’t think he’s cool, why do you let him bully you?” Stephen asked.

“Well because—” Peter broke off, staring at him a little fearfully. 

“What?” Stephen glanced at his fingers, trying to make sure he wasn’t unconsciously tapping the Mystic Arts and conjuring strange insects. He did that when he was tired, sometimes.   
“How did you know?” Peter asked slowly. Suspiciously.

Stephen backtracked through the conversation. “Know wha—oh,  _ shit. _ That’s not a conversation we’ve had yet, is it?”

“You’re wizard-spying on me.”  
“No! And it’s sorcerer.” Stephen rubbed his face, his ragged fingernails catching on his skin. “I just forgot… that… you didn’t tell me about school.”

Peter’s intelligent eyes were flicking across Stephen’s face, and he could see the cogs turning behind them. “Then how did you know?”

“You told me. In a different future. I saw 14,000,605 of them, remember?” Stephen swallowed, his voice catching on the number. 

“You remember all of those?” Peter asked, his suspicion fading. Stephen was immensely relieved. 

“Not every detail of all of them, of course; even my mind couldn’t handle it. But I remember enough.” A ghost of a smile flickered across Stephen’s face, and he rubbed at the spot of his neck behind his ear.

“And I told you about Flash in one of them?”

“A great many of them,” Stephen agreed.

Peter hummed. He ran a finger over the curve of his mug handle, and the Cloak tried to do the same against Stephen’s water bottle. Without looking over, Stephen reached out to catch the tea before it spilled across the floor.

“What else did I tell you?” Peter asked softly.

_ Everything. _

“I know you, Peter Parker,” was all Stephen could think of to reply.

“I don’t…” Peter shook his head, a bit helplessly.

Stephen smiled. “I know May’s a god at checkers, and though she’s terrible at it she loves to cook. I know Ned Leeds gave you the ‘Lettuce’ shirt you were wearing under your suit on Titan—he’s your best friend at Midtown Science and Tech. I know you like chemistry and robotics and  _ Doctor Who  _ and  _ Star Wars.  _ I know you’re claustrophobic after what happened with the Vulture, and I know your uncle—”

Stephen cut himself off.

Peter was staring at him, face a bit pale, and Stephen cleared his throat awkwardly. “Or… something,” Stephen coughed.

Peter nodded, taking a rather clumsy drink of tea. “Well, you aren’t wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” Stephen said after a moment. 

“What for?”

Stephen gestured to Peter’s form. “I can’t help it, the knowing. I shouldn’t… you never told me in this universe, and in this universe I don’t have any right to remember. I don’t deserve to know any of you.”

“Don’t, it’s alright.” Peter smiled easily, though he still looked a bit disoriented. “I mean, you aren’t the last stranger I’d choose to know all my secrets.”

Stephen rolled his eyes. “Good to know.”

“I just… that’s a lot of secrets. A lot of futures. I didn’t even think about what you saw, other than… y’know, the One. You must feel so omniscient, knowing everything with nobody to know you.”

Peter looked up, fixing Stephen with warm brown eyes, and the empathy there took Stephen’s breath away. 

So he told the boy the truth. “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “It’s… comfortable. To know, to understand people’s words and people’s motives. I knew you didn’t mean it when you blamed me on the pier five months ago, and it saved me.”

“Oh,” Peter said. “You like knowing? Just for the sake of knowing?”

Stephen shrugged. “I suppose I could come up with a reason. But yeah. Just for knowing.” Then he smiled. “And before you say it, yes, I am a total Ravenclaw.”

Peter chuckled, mimicking Stephen’s shrug. “Do you remember just people?” he asked curiously. “Or events and actions, too?”

Stephen contained his wince, wrapping his hands around his tea and nodding.

“What’s the weirdest thing you remember?”

Stephen snorted. “Pete, there were at least five million futures where we jumped on Quill’s ship and ran, and in over half of those you adopted a space dragon that always ended up eating you after varying amounts of time. A lot of weird shit happened.”

Peter giggled a bit, wrapping his scarf around his palm offhandedly while the Cloak batted at the dangling edge of it. “I suppose that makes sense.” He tapped his chin in thought, biting both lips in that way that he did. “What’s your favorite memory, then?”

The spot behind Stephen’s ear burned. 

He stood up abruptly, stiff and straight, before pretending to straighten the coffee table. Peter’d set his tea down, and it splashed within his mug as Stephen braced his hands against the surface of the desk. 

“I don’t know why you’re so interested in this,” Stephen snapped. “It doesn’t matter. None of it actually happened, anyway. It’s not real, it wasn’t ever real.”

Peter looked at him with a broken sort of kindness no child should know. “It was real to you,” he said quietly.

Warm breath and soft lips and fingers against his neck, cupping his jaw, trailing along the skin behind his ear.

Stephen closed his eyes, shaking his head with an almost aggressive conviction. “It wasn’t,” he assured. “It wasn’t. None of it was real.”

“Why not?” Peter asked, and Stephen straightened, stalking toward the fireplace.

“Because it  _ didn’t happen.  _ I remember events that never came to pass and actions nobody took and words he—no one truly spoke.” The laugh that tore from his throat was cold and dark and ugly. “And that’s the definition of being insane.” 

“You’re not insane.”

“Maybe not. But my  _ memories  _ are just as real as those of a schizophrenic.” Stephen swept the dust off of the mantle with a shaking hand, looking at the way it coated the lines on his palms.

“Flash really does bully me,” Peter insisted. “And the building falling really did hurt in more ways than one.”

“So what?”  
“So some of it is real.”

Stephen squeezed his eyes shut, his fingernails digging into the soft flesh behind his ear. “Stop it,” he murmured, half to Peter and half to the whispers pulling false memories from their boxes, drifting images across his eyes he’d worked so hard to tuck away. “Stop.”

“Oh—” Peter’s voice was instantly flooded with guilt, and Stephen tried not to let that make him feel worse. “I’m sorry.”

“I need to get back to work.” Stephen’s voice didn’t tremble. It didn’t inflect, either. But it was either the flatness or nothing at all, so he settled for what he could get. 

“Right,” Peter said meekly. “Sorry to bother you.”

He should say it was fine, that he enjoyed Peter’s visit, because he had. But Stephen could only nod and conjure something to keep the weather off Peter before nearly racing from the room. 

Peter walked home in the February rain beneath a red and gold umbrella. 

  
  


He came back three days later with a deck of cards and a cribbage board. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I bet you 50 Hogwarts points that half of you freaked out when the first words were 'Months passed' because you thought we were still in dimension 2000004. XD I'm right, aren't I.
> 
> Anyway, Peter is a 17 year old god at cribbage, uncaring of its status as an Old Person game, change my mind.
> 
> I'vebeenwaitingforthismomentforsolong ANYWAY thanks for reading!!! Hope you still don't hate me!!! Wooo!!! See you soon!


	30. You and Me

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter woke up Monday morning with the distinct feeling that something was missing. It was just a tickle in his woozy mind, just an itch behind the retreating vibrance of his dreams, but it was stubborn and unshakable.

And when he remembered, it was more painful than a sock to the gut.

Peter sat up straight, suddenly clutching at his throat as it clogged with a regret that made his eyes water and his esophagus tighten. 

“Shit,” he murmured, biting his lip to try and keep it from trembling. 

Then he was up, rolling out of bed and fumbling for the second drawer in his bedside table. It was empty; no Stone, no list. And when Peter jabbed at the hatch to his attic, there was no suit. The events of the night before weren’t some nightmare he’d conjured up; they’d truly happened. 

He really had said those things.

Peter flopped back onto his bed, staring unseeingly at his hands. They were still discolored, ever so slightly, from the blast in the elevator. 

Loki was gone. 

Peter’d driven him away. He turned his hindsight toward what he’d said, and almost couldn’t force himself to remember—he couldn’t really have said… he couldn’t have. He didn’t. 

He had.  

He hadn’t meant… Peter’d just wanted Loki to understand that he couldn’t help the god anymore. Peter wasn’t enough for him, their quest, or the world that claimed to need him without the tools that let him fight and move and  _ work _ . He couldn’t  _ do anything,  _ not without the suit he hadn’t earned. 

Without Spider-Man, Peter was just an ordinary kid. An ordinary kid with a tendency to get sensorily overwhelmed, an inability to speak to peers, and a future he hadn’t considered. A future… of waiting around and being helpless, unable to correct injustice. 

And as much as that terrified Peter, it made him all the more angry. 

But not enough… not enough to  _ say that  _ to Loki, dear God, had he really— 

‘ _ You were the only person who never thought of me that way.’ _

Peter felt like throwing up.

Racing across the room, he pried the window open with all the force in his enhanced muscles. The glass rattled in the window panes. Peter craned out, ignoring the scent of refuse on the wind as it assaulted his nose, and saw nothing. 

He didn’t know what he’d expected. But seeing the empty ally still made his chest constrict. 

“Mr. Loki!” Peter called in a hoarse whisper, some semblance of logic still reminding him he couldn’t go screaming the Asgardian’s name in the same building as his aunt. “I didn’t—are you—God, I’m so sorry!”

But there was only silence. 

“SHIT!” Peter roared, slamming his fists onto the windowsill. He could see the slivers in the wood from where Loki’s knife had rested so many times. 

He’d fucked up. He’d fucked up so royally he couldn’t even  _ begin  _ to imagine how he’d reconcile this, how he’d fix what he’d broken. Peter scrubbed his face with his hands, his eyes stinging, and took a long breath.

Finding Loki took first priority. He’d missed enough days of school, but it hardly mattered; Peter’d slip off the subway by his alley next to Delmars and start swinging. Maybe Loki had gone back to the weapons dealers, and if Peter could find them he—

It all came crashing down again. 

He wouldn’t be finding anybody, not for a long time. Even just starting to look was useless, if not impossible; it’d take him all day to cross Queens without his suit, and he had no capabilities, no weapons,  _ nothing.  _ Even with his old web-shooters, hiding under the locker bay at Midtown, Peter could hardly fight. Swing, perhaps, and stop a lost bus, sure, but  _ fight?  _

And if Peter really let himself consider, he knew Loki hadn’t gone to Toomes. Loki hadn’t gone anywhere.

He was a raven high above the New York skyline, or a rat in its streets, or a cat along it rooftops, and Peter would never find him. Because Loki wouldn’t be able to find himself.

_ And it’s my fault.  _

He’d just been so  _ angry.  _ And Loki hadn’t understood, hadn’t let him explain… and then the god had started lying, and Peter, furious, had started lying back. 

Because what else could Loki’s claim have been? 

_ His son. _

It was ridiculous. Peter, as close as a son to Tony Stark? Sure, he respected the man, looked up to him, but Stark was a hero and a genius and  _ everyone  _ looked up to him.

Peter was nothing special. Stark couldn’t even trust him to have his priorities straight, let alone enough to…

What? To teach him? Speak to him? 

Love him?

Peter aggressively shut down that train of thought. He didn’t want, or need, a father; not now, not ever. He wasn’t a kid anymore. Growing up, figuring out his future, learning how to live in this crazy, endless, precious world—he could do that. He’d done that, together with May in their bubble of a life in Queens, and even after the spider-bite, Peter’d been learning and changing and growing.   

Peter knew who he was, goddamn it! 

Maybe if he thought it loud enough, he’d forget it was the biggest lie he’d ever told.

_ His son. _

Loki had been lying. Or he’d been confused. Maybe he’d been straight-up wrong. The reason wasn’t important; all that mattered was the conclusion was simply ridiculous.

Peter didn’t see Mr. Stark that way. He  _ didn’t.  _ And he didn’t want to, either.

Now Loki was gone and the suit had been taken and Peter’d never felt so alone, so confused, so goddamn _ lost.  _ And there was no one to blame but himself. He gripped his wrist, trying to ground himself, imagining his grip tightening until it sliced right through his hand. He imagined the hand scurrying around the room and crawling into the second drawer of his bedside table.

“Fuck,” Peter cursed, dropping his wrist. “It’s all so messed up…”

What was he going to do?

  
  


Peter didn’t say a word to explain. Not one, but Ned still knew, somehow. He wrapped Peter in the biggest, softest hug the boy had felt in a long time, and let Peter just lean into him. Ned smelled like old Legos and the grease of the workshop and he seemed so strong, he always seemed so strong.

“I fucked it up,” Peter choked, wrapping his arms tight around the other boy. “I’m such a dumbass, Ned, I fucked it  _ all up…” _

Ned led him to one of the empty picnic tables by the warm bricks of the school, sliding onto the bench beside him. He kept an arm around Peter’s shoulders, and Peter leaned into the touch, the lack of serpent beneath his clothing all the more obvious. 

“What happened?” Ned asked.

“I… did you hear about the fire?”  
“The Avengers were there.” Ned nodded. “They said there was some trouble with tech recall from previous battles that they were dealing with.”

Peter swallowed. “That’s not what really happened. It was me. And Loki.”

Ned’s arm wrapped around Peter a little further.

“But I… I didn’t mean for anything like the fire to happen. I didn’t mean for… anybody to die.”

“People died—” Ned’s eyes were wide and kind and Peter felt like crying again. “Peter…”

“I didn’t mean any of it,” Peter said again, and his words were almost desperate. “Mr. Stark, he… he took the suit.”

Before Ned could speak, Peter plowed on.

“And I was angry and I tried to tell Mr. Loki that I couldn’t help him save the world anymore, but I… I wasn’t… he didn’t… he didn’t understand, he didn’t listen and I was so  _ angry,  _ Ned.” Peter took a deep breath. “I said some things. I said the worst things. I was trying to hurt him and make him leave and it worked, and now I’ve lost my teammate. My… friend.”

Ned didn’t say anything useless, any meaningless  _ ‘sorry’  _ or false  _ ‘it wasn’t your fault.’  _ He just wrapped his other arm around Peter as though the painful angle of the side-hug didn’t bother him in the least. 

“Are you still angry?” Ned asked quietly. 

Peter shook his head. “Not at them. Just at myself. I said… I called Mr. Loki a murderer, a monster. I accused him of lying about everything, about saving the world and stuff.”

“Did you mean it?”

“No! I mean, I did at the time, or I at least considered it.” Peter lifted his hands, and Ned released him so Peter could run his fingers down his face again. “But he’s gone, Ned, long gone. Took the Time Stone and left, because I drove him away, and I can’t find him. I can’t apologize or ask him what he meant or do  _ anything.” _

Ned nodded. Peter peeked at him out of the corner of his eye; Ned was watching him with earnest understanding, and Peter felt a surge of appreciation for the boy.

“That’s… a problem,” Ned said. 

Peter snorted. “Yeah.”

“What are we gonna do about it?”

Peter shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what we  _ can  _ do. I can’t just swing around and fix this; I’m not Spider-Man anymore.”

“But you’re still my best friend,” Ned said with conviction strong enough to stop Captain America in his tracks. “And you’re still a good person.”

Peter glanced at the boy. “Thanks, Ned.”

“Let’s go to class,” Ned suggested. “Which will be boring and long. That’s like you being my best friend; it doesn’t change. But maybe you need something else to focus on.”

“Alright.”

“We’ll figure this out,” Ned promised. “You and me. We’ll make this work.”

Peter let himself smile a bit. “You and me.”

  
  


Peter ran into Liz halfway through fifth period, a hall pass clutched tight in his hand and his mind far away. It came back to Earth with a bump and a surge of blood to his cheeks as she approached him.

“Um, hi,” Peter managed, fingering the pass. 

“I…” Liz looked flustered, and it only made Peter feel even more so. “Look, I wanted to apologize.”

Peter looked up sharply. “What? Why?”

“During Decathlon, I, I didn’t think. I was just so happy and I sort of… just acted, y’know?” 

She took a deep breath, and Peter’s brain was starting to catch up. It didn’t like what it was hearing, but he still felt like he was trying to make his body do something while he was hovering outside of it.

“I thought—I wasn’t thinking,” she continued. “We were just—you looked—and now you’re avoiding me and that’s  _ not  _ what I was trying to do and I’m—”

“Wait, wait,” Peter finally said. “I’m not… I’m not avoiding you?”

Liz’s brow furrowed, and she looked him up and down. “It… sort of seems like it.”

_ Shit.  _ Peter ran his hands through his hair—or at least tried to. The hall pass hit him in the face as he raised it, and he winced, somehow even more embarrassed. “I… it’s just… it’s been a weird week and I—”

“I understand.” She looked sad though, and Peter had the distinct feeling that she was in fact misinterpreting greatly. 

“No,” Peter assured. “Liz, I really… I really like you.”

“I thought you did,” she said. “And I like you. That’s why I…” Her hands vibrated awkwardly.

Peter’s cheeks were burning, but he couldn’t help his smile. 

“You almost  _ died,”  _ she said. “Decathlon was the most important thing, and then we all were nearly exploded.”

“Yeah.” Peter swallowed. “That’s why I’ve been… weird. I’d hoped no one would notice.”

She shrugged. “I don’t want to say I’ve been watching you, cuz that’s creepy, but, like, I noticed?”

Peter chuckled a bit, wrapping and rewrapping the string of the hall pass around his hand. “I should have tried to talk to you. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Liz said. “Guess we both should have said something.”  
Peter nodded. 

“Do you… are you going to homecoming?” she asked quietly.

“Yeah—uh, yeah,” Peter managed. “Do you want… do you want to come with me?”

Liz smiled, and Peter’s stomach reminded him just how beautiful it was. “I’d like that.”

“Really?”

“Well, I kissed you at a national science tournament; I should hope so!”

Peter was bright red, and she was bright red, and the awkwardness was enough that he could take a bite out of it, but Peter still laughed. 

“Nice,” he said. 

“Nice,” Liz echoed.

Peter glanced down at the pass in his hand, then pointed over her shoulder. “I’m actually going that way,” he explained, and she danced to the side.

“See you, then, Peter.”

Peter nodded, meeting her eyes for the half a moment he could manage to do so. “Yeah. See you, Liz.”

As he turned the corner, now possessing both a hall pass and a date with the most wonderful girl in the school, Peter blew out a long, slow breath and smiled. 

Down beneath the flimsy layer of denial, he wondered why he was more scared than excited and more uncomfortable than happy. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This has been Peter's Aggressive Denial, tune in next time for Ned Appreciation Hour. 
> 
> ANYWAY thanks for reading!!! As always, hope you enjoyed and that you still don't hate me. :)


	31. One of his Issues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just a warning: there's a pretty graphic description of the death of a pigeon in this chap. It sounds weird now, but you'll understand. Please skip it if it makes you uncomfortable--just stop after Tony's perspective ends! 
> 
> That said, enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Pepper picked up as soon as he called. She said she was already on her way.

Tony sat with his knees drawn up and a notepad across his thighs, absent-mindedly scribbling about everything and anything. Calculations spidered their way down the margins, falling off the blue-lined tiers, and a parade of stick-figure diagrams were ambling across the bottom.

He wasn’t all that injured, not really, but there didn’t seem any reason to fight the doctors and leave the infirmary. It was clean and bright and comfortable. He had responsibilities, but not any more than usual, and the world could wait for the smoke to clear from his lungs. He didn’t have any reason to leave, he didn’t  _ want  _ to leave.

Because the Compound would be silent when he walked through it. And that didn’t bare thinking about. 

Tony glanced toward the small basket in the IV poll beside him. He wasn’t hooked up to it anymore, but he still had the needle taped against the back of his hand on the off chance he might need it. They were more concerned that he  _ wasn’t  _ trying to cut his stay in the infirmary short than they were his actual injuries, he figured.

They probably should be. 

Tony fumbled against the wire of the basket until his finger curled around the sparking thumb-drive tucked into the corner. He’d cleaned it, dug the soot out of the grooves and from between the wires, and repositioned the areas misshapen from his less-than-gentle removal of it from the armor. 

It would work. FRIDAY was still there, still coded into the heart of this little stick. All Tony had to do was boot her up again and reconnect her to her capabilities. The thumb-drive was intact, for the most part. It would  _ work. _

It had to.

He couldn’t lose FRIDAY, too. There were so few left to trust; he needed her. He needed her alive, he needed her speaking, he needed her feeling again. 

Tony ran his thumb across the surface of the thumb-drive. He thought he could still feel the heat of the inferno imbued in the metal, and shivered. Slipping the stick into the breast pocket of his somewhat expensive hospital scrubs, Tony reached for his notepad again.

The door burst open.

Tony looked up a bit more slowly than usual, but Rhodey didn’t notice as he stormed into the room with as much aggressive force as the supports on his legs could muster. 

“What’s wrong with you?” his friend demanded.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “I’m doing rather well, I had thought.”

“You’re being a  _ good patient.  _ You’re never a good patient. It’s freaking me out, and it’s freaking the doctors out, and I’m pretty sure it’s freaking you out, too.”

A shrug. Tony started doodling in the corner of the notepad, again. 

After a long moment of getting no answer, Rhodey asked, “did you call Pep?”

Tony nodded. “On her way. She’ll handle the media while I deal with the fallout with the Accords council.”

Rhodey winced. “That’s gonna be ugly. What are you going to do about the kid?”

“Stall,” Tony replied truthfully. “Bluff. Divert the blame and alleviate any Spider-Man suspicions.”

“Using the power of bullshit?”  
Tony smirked. “You know me so well, Honey Bear. Using the precise and awe-inspiring power of bullshit.”

Rhodey sighed that fond, long-suffering sigh reserved only for Tony, sliding across the room to perch at the tip of Tony’s bed. “You’re command of such power never ceases to amaze me.”

“Thank you.”

Rhodes punched his knee, and Tony’s pen went rogue, slashing a dark line against the notepad. Tony frowned at it, then jabbed the pen in Rhodey’s direction. “Careful, this is a delicate process.”

“Oh?” Rhodey said with a hint of sarcasm. “Do explain.”

“I’m designing the alloy for Vision’s new shoulder joint.”

“I thought I told you they already fixed it? The Cradle’s still programmed specifically for his makeup.”

Tony grimaced.

“Okay fine,” Rhodey admitted, “that isn’t what they said. There were a lot of fancy science words thrown in there that didn’t seem of paradigm importance to the  _ point. _ Which is that he’s fine. Healed. Good as new.”

Tony shook his head. “The melting point of vibranium is so high the flames in the warehouse should not have been able to do such damage. Either it came from the source explosion of the energy core, or the bonding of Vision’s flesh has lowered that property of the metal. If so, who knows what other properties could have been altered, or are being altered now?”

“He’s alright, Tony,” Rhodey said. “He is.”

Tony sighed. “I know. It’s more… a mind exercise. Keep the genius busy!” 

Rhodey wasn’t buying his grin; he never did. “What’s up, Tones. Really?” 

Tony relented with a sigh, dipping his hand into his breast pocket and removing FRIDAY’s thumb drive. “I don’t know… I don’t know if she’s still operational.”

Rhodey held out his hands, and Tony tossed the stick to him, trusting him to catch her. 

His friend examined the thumb drive with a critical eye. Tony saw the precise moment when he read the inscription and dropped into understanding with an almost audible  _ thud.  _

“Oh,” Rhodey said. “Shit.”

“Yeah.”

“Have you tried?”

Tony shook his head. “I’m just… what if I plug her in and she doesn’t answer? I can’t—I don’t—”

Rhodey shushed him. “I understand. Do you want me to do it?”

A moment of thought, then Tony shook his head. “No. I should. Just… not yet. I need to figure out what the fuck I’m going to do, first.”

“Or you could stop jumping to the worst-case scenario and just try. Maybe she’s fine; you built her hearty. A little flame never stopped you, and I can’t see it stopping FRIDAY either.” Rhodey offered a smile. 

_ But what if you’re wrong? What if I lose her, too? _

“I can see you spiraling in there.” Rhodey waggled his fingers, extending his arms so they were directed at Tony’s face. “Stop. Keep hoping, okay? You’re being… pessimistic, and it’s not like you.”

Tony, huffing, knocked away Rhodey’s hands. He was a lot of things; arrogant, overreactive, on-edge, irreverent, combative, with a power to run a group of people but an inability to connect to individuals in any healthy way. His trust issues had trust issues. But he’d always dreamed, he’d always hoped—Tony Stark wasn’t a pessimist. He could be sceptical, sometimes even cynical, but he always  _ believed. _

It was one of his issues.

But right now… right now the thought of hoping made him tired. No, it was the thought of hoping and being  _ wrong,  _ again, that had Tony so unwilling to get out of that bed. 

He knew, somewhere, that he was being stubborn, stubborn and hypocritical, so tired of being uncertain but unwilling to face certainty. The certainty of life, the certainty of respect, the certainty of  _ trust.  _

He wasn’t certain about anything anymore.

Tony chuckled ruefully to himself, and Rhodes quirked an eyebrow. “Have you come to some world-stopping conclusion in there?”

Tony smirked. “Oh, so many, Honey Bear.”

“And what about the kid?” Rhodey asked, shamelessly changing the subject.

“What  _ about  _ the kid? I’ll deal with the Accords, I already said.”

Rhodey sighed. “I don’t mean that, I mean in general. He’s still enhanced, suit or no. He was crime-stopping long before you came along; I know you haven’t forgotten that.”

“I think he’s the one that’s forgotten,” Tony said. “But it doesn’t matter; he needed to see that there are consequences, and the suit is the only leverage I have to show him.”

Tony finished to see Rhodey watching him, eyebrows raised, a pointed sort of smile splitting his face. 

“What?” he demanded.

“Nothing, nothing.”

“Rhodey…”

“Nevermind, Tony, really.” Rhodes chuckled. “Happy’ll be… well, happy not to have to forward all those voicemails to you anymore.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s moving week, Happy needs his full concentration for that. Apparently.”

“He’s taking it very seriously.” 

Tony nodded, frowning slightly. “I’d hoped he wouldn’t. But it is sort of a big deal, I suppose.”

Rhodey offered a reassuring grin, patting Tony lightly one of his upraised knees. Tony kicked him.

“Hey!” Rhodey scuttled off the bed, glowering at the now awkwardly-extended Stark.

Tony grumbled in his general direction and swung his legs over the edge of the mattress. “When’s Pepper getting here?” 

“You tell me. Not nearly soon enough, I’m sure.”

Tony shrugged, holding out a hand. Rhodey tossed FRIDAY’s thumb-drive back to him, and Tony snatched it delicately, stowing it back in his pocket.

“I suppose…” He looked around the infirmary room, once again, and stood with a sigh. “I’ll go and meet her, then.”

Rhodey smiled.

  
  


Pepper looked positively radiant as she unfolded herself from the back of the car, her gaze dancing over the shape of the Compound. She looked positively radiant all the time, and Tony didn’t think he’d ever be used to it. 

When she finally spotted his form in the line of windows, she smiled. Tony couldn’t help but smile back. And oh how he’d missed that, the involuntary joy, always there no matter what fear or guilt or heartbreak she also stirred in him on occasion. But today it was just the joy, and he forgot the thumb drive burning a hole in his pocket—now of a comfortable jacket over a T-shirt bearing a bad joke and and even worse fit—in favor of spinning and trotting along the hallway to meet her at the door.

“Hey, Tony,” she said, wrapping her arms around him without a hint of hesitation. 

Tony inhaled the scent of her shampoo and wished, for the million-and-first time, that he had any words to explain. Any words at all.

“Hi,” Tony grinned, breaking the hug. “Thanks for coming.”

“Of course,” Pepper said. “Somebody had to save your ass.”

Tony smirked, spinning on his heel to lead her through the Compound. “Let me provide you with the grande tour, then.”

“First, you will be informing me  _ exactly  _ what happened yesterday.” Pepper’s eyes scoured him, snagging on the cut on his temple and the burns on his hands. “And why FRIDAY hasn’t greeted me yet.”

Of course she knew, she always knew. Tony sighed, keeping his mask up for no reason at all as she fell into step beside him. Pepper could see through the smirk, tear through it like tissue paper, but even if it didn’t fool her, sometimes it fooled Tony.

He explained quickly and efficiently, with as few inappropriate jokes and bad puns as possible. Pepper didn’t interrupt, and Tony could see her brilliant mind twisting his story into something with just enough truth to be accepted by the public, yet still retain the privacy of the fighters, the enemy, the dead. 

“Is FRIDAY… compromised?” Pepper asked when he had finished.

“I don’t know,” Tony replied. “I haven’t checked.”

“I would have thought that the first thing you’d have done.”

Tony reached into his pocket, offering Pepper the thumb drive without looking at her. “Yeah, I’ve been getting that all day,” he all but snapped.

Pepper took FRIDAY’s heart with gentle fingers. Then she took his hand, comforting and understanding, and Tony’s heart sped. But he wasn’t allowed to think about that, not until he found those elusive words. The impossible apologies, the ethereal promises. 

“I’ll do it with you,” she said. 

Tony nodded. He thought maybe that would be alright. He thought maybe he’d be able to face FRIDAY’s certainty, as long as Pepper was here. In whatever fashion they happened to be speaking, in whatever way they’d decided to see each other, it was better with Pepper. 

And Tony, stubborn and hypocritic and cynical, believed in better.

So he allowed himself to hope when he slipped the thumb-drive into the port of the lab’s computer. He allowed himself to believe, as the machine processed the data flowing through it, that his hope was warranted.

And when FRIDAY’s voice hummed through the Compound, Tony allowed himself to laugh.

* * *

 

Pigeons were vicious.

Loki hadn’t expected it, but he couldn’t say he was disappointed. There was a thrum of primal instinct in his blood as the feathers fell around him, but he wasn’t sure if it came from him or the genes of the form he currently inhabited. 

Loki extended his claws, hissing low and deep as another bird dived for his eyes. Their screeches chorused beautifully, and their blood smelled savory and satisfying. Loki’s own blood clotted at his shoulder from a particularly tenacious strike, pulling his black fur into clumps, and his tail lashed against his airborne prey.

There were three of them, two bluish and one mottled white and orange. He’d expected them to flee as soon as he pounced, but to his joyful surprise, they fought instead. 

Loki ducked a dive-bomb, tongue flicking over his fangs, and leapt. His tail puffed for balance as he twisted, latching his front paws into the breast of one of the birds. It let out a piercing cry, strangled and pain-filled, but Loki’s caterwaul drowned it out. More feathers ripped from around his claws as the bird tried to twist away. 

Loki’s snout wrinkled in a snarl, and he dug in further, lifting his back legs to try and take hold. The other two pigeons fled, their light-colored wings disappearing into the smog-covered sky, but Loki’s weight kept the third pinned. 

They hit the ground hard when the pigeon's wings finally gave out. Their screeches bounced in the alley, echoing into a deafening crescendo of chaos and fear. 

Loki narrowed feline eyes and rolled atop the bird, ignoring its talons ripping at the soft skin of his underbelly. The pain was dull, anyway; everything was dull, everything but the blood he could feel pounding beneath the bird’s skin. 

Loki’s claws pinned the pigeon's wings to the cobbles. It’s head lashed back and forth, it’s struggles fading as fluid began to leak around Loki’s paws. 

Baring his fangs and lashing his tail, Loki raised his head. He wanted the bird terrified, wanted it to know every helpless moment of its controlled demise. 

It froze. Loki’s tail crooked in a cruel, broken pleasure, and he lowered his head. 

Slowly, achingly, Loki closed his fangs around the bird’s neck. He bit down slowly, breaking the skin in increments, until the pigeon ripped its own throat out with a final surge of terrified struggling. 

Blood surged against Loki’s tongue, and he thrust his snout further into flesh and sinew and then he was biting down on bone, severing life-nerve. 

The pigeon twitched one final time and lay still. 

Loki sat back, licking the blood off his muzzle. It tasted of caramelized tang and sky. Feathers stuck to his paws, to his snout, carnage—his and the creature’s—sliding down his neck and shoulders. If he’d had the anatomy, he would have laughed.

Sick pleasure surged again, and Loki ripped a mouthful of flesh from the bird’s breast. It’s heart was in his teeth, still and dead. 

But when he swallowed, it stuck in his throat. 

Loki’s feline eyes caught the wide, dull ones of his victim, deep and brown. And suddenly, the cruel satisfaction that had pounded through his veins dropped away, like fog clearing in the glare of the sun.

To be replaced with horror. 

Loki sprang away from the corpse before him, his ears flattening, blood and flesh suddenly sour in his mouth. 

_ Murderer, monster— _

There was gore oozing like treacle from the gaping rents in the pigeon’s body, staining the asphalt beneath it, dark from perforated organs. Nothing but thin tendons and sticking feathers held the head to the torso. Wings broken, lying useless; eyes dead, wide in fear—

Loki retched, blood and bile rising in his throat. He was trembling, perched on his hackles, tail wrapped around his paws. The blood on his body burned, thick and putrid against his fur. 

He’d done that. He’d fastened deadly blades on a lifeforce and cut, bleeding the future away in fear and pain. And he’d enjoyed it.

_ Murderer, monster—  _

Loki retched again.

This wasn’t who he was anymore. It  _ couldn’t  _ be. He was more than this, he was better than this, better then some torturing sadist, better than a vicious, unfeeling villain.

But there was a being lying with its throat torn open and its ribs splayed like daffodil petals, and there was blood on his paws and on his snout and in his mouth, and he’d  _ enjoyed it. _

_ This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am, this isn’t, it isn’t, it isn’t it  _ isn’t—

_ Me.  _

Loki turned tail and fled, not even realizing when his magic flickered to the surface of his skin and turned his fur red where the blood had brushed it.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay,,,, so that happened.
> 
> It got away from me a little. 
> 
> Anyway, as always, thanks for reading, and I hope you *still* don't hate me. XD


	32. Someone Missing

 

**Earth-199999:** **_February 2024_ **

Stephen found that he was rather good at card games.

It took a while to get there, as the cards were thin and the strength of his hands didn’t extend to gripping suchlike. He had a tendency to drop them, to knock over the stack when drawing, and to otherwise showcase his hand to the ruthless teenager playing against him. 

But after Peter came the fifth time with a rubber gadget clutched in his fist, things had turned on their head. Drastically.

“What is that?” Stephen had demanded, for Peter had looked so triumphant.

“This,” Peter grinned and waggled his eyebrows, “is your salvation.”

It was a disk of rubber with a slit carved in the side, easily gripped in Stephen’s palm. Cards slotted between the flaps of the device, fanned out due to the pressure of the rubber, and suddenly holding a hand of playing cards was the least of Stephen’s worries.

And beating Peter rocketed up to top priority.

“Okay, you have to be cheating, now,” Peter muttered as he moved Stephen’s cribbage peg twenty-one spaces. 

“Nope.” Stephen couldn’t contain his smirk as the Cloak layed its cards down, crossing its collars in irritation when they only totaled four. “Pretty sure it’s impossible to cheat at cribbage.”

“I wouldn’t put it past you, magic man,” Peter sighed, counting his own points and laying out his crib. He didn’t do too badly; ten in his hand and eight in the extra one. “Scott palms cards all the time.”

Stephen huffed. “He’s not actually magic.”

“Close enough.”

_ “No—”  _ Stephen cut himself off when he saw Peter biting his lip, holding in a laugh. He huffed, and the Cloak swatted Peter’s ear somewhat aggressively. 

“Hey! Not my fault your wizard’s so easily antagonizable,” Peter said, poking back at the Cloak. “I wonder if he could win against Lang.”

“Let me beat you, first,” Stephen said. He began the arduous process of shuffling, and the slow, clumsy movements of the deal.

“For the sixth time,” Peter grumbled. He watched Stephen, lapsing into a thoughtful silence, and for a moment the only sound was the repeated  _ slap… slap… slap…  _ of cards on cards. Stephen braced himself. When Peter was quiet, it either meant something very profound or very random was about to be voiced for consideration.  

He didn’t disappoint. 

“I wonder who would win if we got all the wizards together,” Peter mused.

Stephen attempted not to roll his eyes. The Cloak wasn’t so subtle, crooking its collar and slumping its shoulders in that way it did when it was profoundly exasperated.

“At cribbage, or in a fight?” Stephen asked.

“Either. How many wizards do we have?”

Stephen shuddered. “Don’t make me name off the masters and novices, please—”

“No no, not your sorcerer clique.” Peter waved a dismissive hand. “The Avenging wizards.”

Stephen, slowly, raised an eyebrow.

Peter was on a role now, his brow furrowed, his gaze staring forward but not really focusing as he spoke. “That’s you, and Maximoff, and… Loki? Did he count?”

“As an Avenger? No. As an Avenging Wizard? You haven’t defined the criteria of that particular sect.” Stephen picked up his hand, shoving Peter’s cards toward him. “My crib.”

Peter pried his cards from the surface of the table, a bit lethargically. “Yeah, so you, Wanda, Loki, Scott—”

Stephen stiffened involuntarily, and Peter nearly choked trying to contain his laughter.

“Kidding, kidding,” the boy said. “I’m inclined to think you’d win in this scenario.”

“In this afterlife-spanning cribbage match? I’m glad.”

Peter shrugged, pulling two cards from his hand and sliding them across the table to join Stephen’s crib. “Only one of the participants is dead.”

“Yes, but that still requires supernatural—”

Stephen broke off.

Loki had died in Thanos’s assault on the Asgardian refugee ship. A victim of the Titan, but not of the Decimation, snuffed out by Thanos’s own hand—Thor had said as such in about seventy-five of the futures.  

Loki was a sorcerer, a warrior, a powerhouse. He wasn’t helpless. And he’d died before.

If he’d survived those, why not this one? He could have. He hadn’t, of course, but he  _ could have. _

And possibility was all the timeline needed. 

_ Someone he could save by letting them die. _

Stephen stood, his card-device dropping from his hand.

“Doctor Stra—” Peter began, his tone confused. He stood, too, his muscles already coiled to face unknown threat.

Stephen wasn’t really looking at him, wasn’t really looking at anything as he started toward the stairs to the library. He spoke mostly for his own benefit when he said, “I need to speak to the Guardians of the Galaxy.”

  
  


As it turned out, getting in contact with spaceship-contained, space-traveling convicts was far easier than Stephen had expected.

Namely, their engineer had email addresses. 

Stephen had holed himself up in the library, the Cloak fluttering around him with varying amounts of emotion, and managed to compose something moderately articulate with his shaking fingers on his phone’s tiny keys. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used the thing for precisely that reason. 

But this was worth the onerous task of typing, slow and painful, a message. It took about half an hour, but Stephen was rather pleased with what he ended up with.

_ ‘Hello Rocket and Crew, _

_ ‘I am Doctor Stephen Strange; a few of you met me five years ago. I need to speak to Thor; I understand he is on board your ship. If you provide me with a photo, I am capable of portaling myself to your location so the conversation can be carried out most efficiently. _

_ ‘Thank you.’ _

It was short, but it was complete, and he managed to write it without throwing the stupidly tiny, unwieldy phone at the nearest wall. Not that there was anyone around to scold him for it, of course.

Stephen had had more interaction in the last two weeks with Peter’s annoyingly, endearingly consistent visits than he’d had in all the weeks since September combined. Pizza deliveries included. And though he never would have truly believed it, he felt better for them. It was as though Peter’s acknowledgement of his existence had become justification of his existence, proof of it. 

Stephen still  _ was  _ somebody.

Not that he knew who that somebody was. But he did live, and he lived here, in this universe, in this reality, and not in the endless undulations of Time.

Because he had memories, now. Real ones. Ones he could fall back on when he woke up to a thousand different stories clawing at the inside of his skull, screaming for his recognition, screaming for him to remember them, accept them, believe them. 

He’d never played cribbage in any of the millions of futures. Never. So that’s what Stephen thought of, hands curled at his temples, ripping at his skin—how ridiculous the Cloak looked when it held its hand of cards, how comically shocked Peter had been when Stephen first beat him, how cards sounded when they hit the table. 

Stephen fiddled with the smooth case of his phone, watching his reflection in the now-black screen. He needed to shave again. And he needed a haircut. But the blankness of his eyes had filled with something that might be hope. 

The image disappeared as Stephen’s phone lit up.

_ That was quick.  _ Not that he was complaining.

The response was short, curt, and somewhat crude:

_ ‘The fuck do you want with the pirate angel?’ _

Stephen assumed, for the sake of his own sanity, that the last was referring to Thor Odinson, former king of Asgard. He waited hopefully for a moment, but no photo arrived in the email chain, and Stephen resigned himself to another aching typing session. 

_ ‘I have questions to ask him about past events. His brother, specifically. Stop the ship when you send the photo or I won’t be able to portal.’ _

The response was all but immediate, this time. 

_ ‘Fine.’ _

Stephen waited. 

And waited.

And kept waiting

And then, some minutes later, the photo came, zipping open in Stephen’s inbox like the poor, Earthen phone had only barely managed to display it. Stephen couldn’t fault the electronic device; the image was so detailed, so high quality, that he could almost smell the grease and body-odor of the ship and the aliens it contained. 

_ Thank you,  _ Stephen thought. 

A few seconds later, his feet were echoing on metal grating floors, and a thousand different smells and feelings and auras slammed into his perception.

The portal closed behind Stephen with his slight, almost imperceptible stumble. Transitioning instantaneously between drastically different locations didn’t usually affect Stephen, but he wasn’t just jumping continents this time. Stephen had jumped half a universe.

He allowed himself a moment to get his bearings and acclimate himself to the atmosphere of the ship. 

The other passengers of the ship were not so frivolous with their moments. 

“You really did meet a wizard, then!” barked a higher, sharper voice with a bit of perpetual sneer behind it. 

“See, proof,” said a second.  _ “You  _ haven’t provided any for your fantastical jaunt with dwarves, I’ll remind you.”

Stephen suddenly remembered just how tiresome the Guardians of the Galaxy really were. He blinked once, slowly. 

Then he turned, the Cloak situating itself on his shoulders, to face the team facing him. 

They were… somewhat of a sight to behold, simply because of the familiarity oozing sickeningly from them. Six individuals stood aside each other in an order that seemed perfectly natural, at ease with themselves and at ease with the rest. Even Thor, their newcomer, their ‘pirate angel’, seemed to have a niche within the skyline the five others created. 

But there was a hole.

Slightly to the right of the center of the group, a strange emptiness lurked. It shouldn’t have been so glaringly obvious—it wasn’t as though Thor, Quill, Drax, and Mantis had separated themselves from Rocket and Groot—but Stephen could sense something, someone, missing all the same.

He cleared his throat and decidedly did not look at the gap.

“Hello,” he said.

Silence. And then:

“Infinity beer Wizard!” Thor boomed, his voice echoing in the small space.

Everyone suddenly got a lot more friendly-looking. 

“What?” Quill said in Rocket’s direction. “Magic does that?”

Thor ignored the conversation flaring up behind him in favor of approaching Stephen amicably, and thumping him on the shoulder. “It is good to see you,” he said. His voice was softer, earnest, and Stephen couldn’t pretend he wasn’t surprised. 

“Good… to see you too,” Stephen tried. The Cloak tightened its corners around his hands reassuringly. The spot behind his ear itched. 

Thor nodded. “Have you met my friends?”

Not ‘team.’ Not ‘comrades’. Friends.

A lot could change in five months. 

“I have, some of them more briefly,” Stephen said, not sure if it was a lie or not. He glanced over Thor’s shoulder towards the group; Mantis waved. The Cloak waved back.

“Just so we’re clear,” Quill said, raising a hand, “I strongly advised not letting you onto my ship.” 

“The ship.” That from Rocket, supported with a hearty  _ ‘I am Groot’  _ from his left. 

_ “My  _ ship.”

“How is it that you must acquire an image to… arrive?” asked Mantis, skirting forward a bit. The conversation sliced itself in two again as the males kept hissing at each other in the corner. 

“It’s an energy thing,” Stephen said. He tried to keep his focus on both Thor and the antennae girl, though keeping the fidgeting to a minimum while doing so was giving him some trouble. “I need to be able to quantify the specific multiversal location of where I am portaling to, in terms of time, form, and position.”

“And a photograph allows you to do so?”

Stephen nodded. “And I needed you to stop the ship, for if you were traveling fast enough you would have passed through my portal and I would have been sucked into space, along with a cylinder sliced out of your spaceship.”

“That is very interesting,” said Mantis, bobbing onto the balls of her feet. “I have been wondering such questions since our last encounter.”

“A long time.” Stephen offered a smile.

“Not for us.”

Thor tapped his shoulder, and Stephen turned away from Mantis to face him again. It seemed the god was all too keen about the purpose of this visit; Stephen could see something hesitant and warm flickering behind his eyes.

_ Shit.  _

“Let us sit as we speak, should we not?” said Thor. Stephen could only nod.

But as soon as he found himself curled in a spinning pilot's chair, pivoted slightly to face Thor and the Guardians behind him, he forced himself to clarify what none of them wanted to hear.

“I can’t bring him back,” he lied. “That isn’t what this is about.”

It was. But he couldn’t give Thor, give them all, a hope that might be wrong, might be just another one of Stephen’s lies to the inhabitants of this universe.

“I know,” Thor was quick to assure. But the light behind his gaze winked away, so quietly, with such finality.

Stephen swallowed hard.

“You’re cataloguing… threats and suchlike,” the god continued, more to himself than the wizard before him.

“And suchlike,” Stephen agreed softly.

Thor took a breath, then scooted closer in his chair, clasping his hands in his lap and gracing them all with a wide smile that wasn’t quite completely fake. “What is it you need to know?”

“How did he die? Your brother,” Stephen inquired, trying to keep the question as soft as possible.

Thor looked away. “Thanos strangled him. Broke his neck.”

Stephen heard the sickening  _ crunch  _ in a memory not his own and contained his shiver. “What happened directly before that?”

“He provided us all with a traitorous little act, some sarcasm, and an incredibly brave— _ stupid  _ assassination attempt.” Thor’s voice was half anger, half pride, and Stephen had the urge to reach out and pat the enormous knee before him. 

“And before that?”

“He… disappeared. Thanos fought Banner for the Tesseract, and Heimdall…”

Stephen could see Thor contracting in, spiraling into something dark and empty and somewhere far away. His shoulders had tensed, his hands clenching over the armrests of the captain’s chair. 

“Thor?” Rocket was leaning forward, ears swiveled toward the god. “Thor!”

Stephen moved  in an instant, laying his scarred and trembling hand atop the Thor’s, speaking to him directly, only.

“That was five years ago,” Stephen said. “Almost six. You are here now, remember? You exist.”

They were the words he told himself each morning, and they settled almost visibly within Thor’s chest. Slowly, achingly, the god’s gaze swam back to focus. 

Stephen held it the whole time. 

“That’s all I need,” Stephen said firmly. “Thank you.”

“Are you sure?” So obviously both relieved and disbelieving, Thor cocked his head. 

Stephen nodded. 

_ Very sure. _

“Really?  _ Great,”  _ Rocket’s voice was curt, the protective hostility crackling beneath it like lightning. “Stop talking, then.”

“He was not speaking,” Drax pointed out, to no one’s surprise.

“And get off my ship,” Rocket continued, ignoring him.

Thor began, “now wait a moment, Rabbit, there may yet be more—” at the same time Quill growled,  _ “my ship.” _

Stephen stood, smiling a bit. “I do apologize for the interruption of whatever great quest you happen to be on,” he said.

That shut everyone up, and filled the cabin with a guilty energy. 

_ Knew it.  _

Stephen shot Rocket a pointed look, enjoying the way the raccoon bristled defensively, and slipped gracefully from his chair. He wondered if Quill would have reacted the same way.

As he fiddled with his sling-ring, Stephen saw Mantis and Groot sidle closer to Thor, saw Quill and Rocket watch him unblinkingly, saw Drax loom like an unending reminder of something and nothing. And still, there was that hole, that circle of space, drawing his eye like an emerald in a field of rubies. 

Stephen wondered if maybe, just maybe, he could fill that hole again, too.

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I've never written the Guardians before. I've gotta get used to it though--cuz they'll be back! 
> 
> Anyway, hope you enjoyed! I don't think there's any reason to hate me this chapter so THAT'S GOOD heheheheh.


	33. Never One for Sentiment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now...

 

**Dreamscape-200004, Adjacent Astral Plane:** **_May 2018_ **

 

He shouldn’t have spoken. 

The thought was loud and distracting in Loki’s mind as his fingers hovered over the alarm panel. All it would take was a flicker of those fingers atop the codes, and the alarms across Sakaar would be blaring, signaling the beginning of his new life. 

And Thor’s, he supposed as he spared his brother and the illusion a glance. They wouldn’t kill him; the Grandmaster would need a new champion. If Banner and that valkyrie returned, well, the more the merrier. 

And the fewer who would die at Hela’s hand upon their futile return to Asgard. 

It had made so much sense when he’d schemed within his chains. Tell just enough truth to get him out of his bindings, tentatively trusted, or at least relied on to safely commandeer a spaceship. Enable alarms instead of disabling them. Stay on Sakaar, where he wouldn’t live a good life, but he’d at least he wouldn’t die a gruesome death. 

And neither would Thor.

Everything had been proceeding just perfectly, and then he’d gone and  _ spoken _ of it. Standing next to his brother on the elevator, throat still raw from the declaration of alienation, he’d said something far more genuine. 

_ “Here's the thing. I'm probably better off staying here on Sakaar.” _

Loki wasn’t sure why he said it. He didn’t want Thor’s support, Thor’s  _ justification;  _ he wouldn’t get it, and it wouldn’t make any difference anyway.

But he had gotten it. He’d gotten understanding, he’d gotten agreement. Thor had smiled and told him  _ “yes Loki, it’s alright to be different. It’s alright to want your own story. I’ll let you go, if that’s what you need.” _

Not in so many words. But Loki had read the meaning in his brother’s smile and cheerful acceptance, and it had meant something to him. 

Meant a  _ lot  _ to him.

He hadn’t expected the words  _ “it’s probably for the best that we never see each other again”  _ to taste so sour on his tongue. 

_ “It’s what you always wanted.” _

_ What I always wanted. _

_ What do I want?” _

He shouldn’t have spoken. Because now, sentencing his brother to a life away from his people, even if it would be considerably longer than the life Thor had chosen for himself, felt like more than a betrayal. It felt villainous.

And Loki didn’t know if that was who he was, anymore.

His fingers ghosted over the system of alarms, for once heavy with their treachery. He hesitated.

And that cost everything.

“Oh, Loki,” came his brother’s voice, filled with an unsurprised resignation. 

When Loki turned, the words he found rolled off his silver tongue with ease. “I know I've betrayed you many times before, but this time it's truly nothing personal. The reward for your capture will set me up nicely.”

_ I will live. And you will live. _

_ And that is what I want. _

Loki slammed his hand into the alarm panel, and sound screamed through the palace. Allowing a satisfied smirk, Loki shoved his hands into the pocket of his tunic and lifted his chin as he watched Thor.

Who didn’t look… at all concerned. 

“Never one for sentiment, were you?” Thor sighed.

Loki shook his head, his lips still quirked, because  _ of course not.  _ “Easier to let it burn.” 

So much easier. Just as it was easier to lie, for honesty could hurt all the more. Those tiny truths, more corrosive than any lie Loki could craft, whispering their convictions within him, reminding him  _ you aren’t enough, you don’t belong, this will never be your home.  _

Then Thor raised his fist, and in it lay the flashing gold of a fob device. “I agree,” he said, and his smile should not have been so pleased.

Loki’s hand flew to his neck, his head whipping to try and confirm why Thor was so damn  _ satisfied,  _ and there was an Obedience Disk against his back shoulder where Thor had patted him reassuringly on the elevator, and it hadn’t been real after all, and the Disk was vibrating, was turning blue and Loki tried to brace himself. Thor held the button down—did he know the strength of the full volts? Did he know?—and Loki was on the ground, his hand sliding away from the panel at his left.

For a long moment, he couldn’t hear his brother’s words as electric agony rippled up his every nerve. He bit his tongue, his lip, feeling the vein in his neck and along his shoulder pulse with a rhythm that was not welcome in his body. 

When the clatter of the fob device against the docking bay’s metal floor reached his buzzing ears, Loki couldn’t stop the hiss of pained indignation that escaped his lips.

“... guess what I'm trying to say is that you'll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be more. I'll just put this over here for you.”

Thor was getting up, he was getting up and Loki was still on the ground, still convulsing involuntarily as his muscles reacted to the wrong stimulation.

No, he couldn’t have lost this round, he couldn’t have lost this game. How had Thor outplayed him? Thor wasn’t supposed to beat him, and he definitely wasn’t supposed to stoop to Loki’s level. That was the whole premise, those were the  _ rules,  _ and now Thor was walking away and Loki’s vision was whiting into nothingness and this hadn’t been the plan.

With the sound of Thor’s ship blasting out of the hanger and away, Loki’s pain sharpened with the knowledge that he’d been bested.

Maybe forever.

* * *

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

Thursday afternoon, Peter went to Delmar’s.

He hadn’t had a sandwich from the man in weeks, and after his usual rhythm of coming almost everyday, it occurred to him that Delmar might be worried. Or at least curious.

And it wasn’t like he had anything else to do anymore, anyway.

Ned offered to come with him, and so did Liz, but Peter refused; he and May had homecoming preparations later that day, and Peter thought he should at least try to look like he knew what he was doing. He made his way along the crowded sidewalks and tried not to let his eyes slide up to the niches on the roofs where his webbing would have stuck. It was harder than he’d thought.

Mr. Delmar waved when Peter slipped into the deli, the bell ringing merrily with his arrival. “Mr. Parker! Haven’t seen you in a while.”

Peter smiled, sidling up to the counter. “Been busy, y’know.”

“With what?” The question was easy, just for conversation’s sake as Delmar already began adding up Peter’s usual order, but Peter still stumbled for something to say.

“Uh,” he coughed.  _ Fighting crime, trying to save the universe, screwing it all up and ending up a useless teenager again. Dreaming about the people who died. Crying too much.  _ “Decathlon and stuff.”

Delmar whistled. “Hm. Nationals?”

“Yeah. We won.” Peter allowed himself a bit of pride in that.

“Nice!” said the man. “Congratulations!” 

The grin on his face was true and excited, and Peter returned it without too much effort. “Thanks. Number five?”

“Already up,” said Delmar. He ambled back toward the kitchen, and Peter slunk along the counter as he fumbled in his wallet for five dollars. Pausing next to the rack, he swiped a packet of gummy bears for good measure. 

Something furry and warm brushed against his leg. Peter’s instincts had him jumping away, but it was only Murph, bumbling about with a lazy sort of smile. 

“Hey,” Peter cooed, kneeling and holding out a hand. “I missed you, Murph.”

The cat meowed, flicking his tail and waddling toward the edge of the ordering counter. Peter glanced toward the kitchen, but his sandwich had yet to appear. He could already taste the tang of pickles. Licking his lips, Peter settled to wait.

Murph circled back toward him a moment later, bumping against Peter’s ankles a bit more pointedly. 

“What?” Peter laughed. “You hungry too?”

The cat meowed, quite loudly. He stood, stalking around the edge of the counter, and Peter peered around the edge to watch him retreat. 

“Don’t let Murph bully you into feeling sorry for him,” Delmar called. “I just fed him and the other guy not half an hour ago.”

Following Murph’s path, Peter spotted two empty bowls tucked against the back of the store. He frowned. “‘The other guy?’”

“Yeah,” Delmar said, appearing from the whitewashed walls of the kitchen. He swung around to the server’s opening and swiped something from the counter—Peter’s sandwich, wrapped in paper. “I’ve attracted another stray, it seems.”

Peter craned over the ordering counter, trying to spot the creature Delmar spoke of. Murph, pleased with Peter’s apparent attention, purred loudly and smacked at his empty dish. 

Delmar sidled up next to Peter and poked him with his sandwich; Peter handed him a five dollar bill without looking. The cash register  _ pinged  _ as the man started to rifle within it. 

“Where…” Peter began, unable to distinguish Delmar’s stray. But movement beneath one of the racks caught his eye, and a shape began to form within the shadows cast by the candy and chip bags.

A flash of reflection was nearly blinding in the dark area as the light glanced of the inhabitant’s eyes. Peter knelt, trying to get a better look at the cat, and it bolted forward to slip beneath the counter. All Peter identified was a flash of jet black fur before it was gone behind Delmar’s legs. 

The man chuckled and turned back to Peter, brandishing the sandwich. Peter took it a bit vacantly. Moving aside to allow Peter to crane over the counter, Delmar was still chuckling, and Peter was still frowning.

The stray was thin and sleek, with fur too lush to be a street animal but a manner to skittish to be anything else. There were spots of deep, strange red splattered across its muzzle and shoulder, stark against the onyx of the rest of its form. 

And its eyes were green.

Peter met them, and froze. The cat didn’t move, not even a twitch of its whiskers, and stared up at him without the slightest hint of conscious emotion. 

“Hi,” Peter said quietly. Then he glanced at Mr. Delmar, who was watching him curiously. “Could I…”

“Sure,” Delmar said, beckoning for Peter to join him behind the counter. “Be my guest. I’ll be shocked if you can touch ‘er, though.”

Peter paused. “Her?”

Delmar looked down at the black and red creature and shrugged. “Not sure, I suppose. Just seemed like it at the time.”

Peter couldn’t really find anything to say to that, so he just nodded and began to slowly inch around the counter. Every instinct was telling him to speed up, to dart to confront the animal on the deli tile before he—she, it—could make a run for it, but he knew he had to move slowly. It showed control, showed a sort of trust; the creature could flee if it felt the need.

_ Please don’t run, please don’t run, please don’t run. _

The cat didn’t so much as blink. Somehow, that was all the scarier. 

The doorbell jingled, and Delmar moved away to speak to the incoming customer, much to Peter’s relief. Peter crouched, nearly crawling the last few feet until he was sitting at a nonthreatening distance from the cat.

With cool, calculating coldness, it watched Peter.  _ He  _ watched Peter. No one else could carve a mask like that, with an easy sort of judgement that might even have been real.

“Is that you, Mr. Loki?” Peter asked quietly. 

The cat didn’t move.

“It is, I know it.” Peter rubbed his face, settling onto his knees. “I never thought… God, I’m so lucky, I never thought I’d get to see you again.”

To Peter’s immense comfort, the cat cocked its head.

“I…” He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what he could possibly say, how he could even begin to convey how fucking sorry he was, how much of a dumbass he’d become.

So he was quiet, mute. For too long.

The cat—Loki, it had to be—stood, his tail flicking almost dismissively. His ears were pressed against his skull with tension, and his hackles were bristling. 

And everything came out of Peter’s mouth at once. “Wait, don’t, I didn’t mean anything I didn’t want to drive you away I mean I guess I did but don’t go away again  _ please  _ just give me a chance, okay, just a chance?”

Loki paused. Likely because he was still working through the mad tangle of words Peter had just spewed, but it was enough.

Peter swallowed any fear, any pride, and kept talking. “Loki, I am so, so sorry."

Staring him down, Loki stood.

“It started… I was just trying to explain. I wasn’t thinking straight, and I probably didn’t even do the explaining part well… It just, it was, I had to make you understand. It started that way. But then it stopped being about understanding at all; my words weren’t just lies, Mr. Loki, they were cruel. Evil. And I’m sorry.”

Loki’s ears twitched. The fur on his flanks had flattened, just a bit. 

“You haven’t done anything to me, not one thing,” Peter continued, “to deserve what I did. And I haven’t done anything to deserve your forgiveness, but I’m still sorry.”

Loki took a step toward him. Just one, his head cocking to the side, his tail quirking into a hook. The splotches of red fur drew Peter’s eye, their patterns like drips or splatters. He wondered what it was like to have the power of an Infinity Stone folded within your very skin.

“You aren’t a murderer anymore, and you certainly aren’t a monster.” Peter extended his hand, his palm turned toward the sky. “You’re my friend. And I’m yours, though I’ve been doing a rather terrible job at it.”

For a long moment, the cat did nothing. Then, slowly, he padded toward Peter until he was sitting not six inches away from the boy’s crossed knees. He lifted a paw. 

Peter could feel the sheathed claws beneath Loki’s fur as the paw settled on his palm. 

He smiled. “I’m sorry.”

The cat nodded.

And Delmar made a surprised exclamation as he turned away from the ordering counter and nearly tripped over them. 

Peter quickly retracted his hand, standing and trying not to look suspicious. Looking him over with a slight grin, Delmar nodded and said, “well I’ll be damned, then, she let you touch her.”

Peter thought fast. “I know this guy, actually,” he said. “He belonged to a classmate.”

“Oh!” Delmar looked surprised. “Well, I’m glad you came ‘round, then. Does… he… have a proper home with your friend?”

“Not a friend.” Peter shook his head. “They turned this guy out, I think.”

Delmar looked affronted, turning to look at Loki as he quirked his ears toward them in questioning interest. “Oh no! Well, he’s welcome here.”

Peter smiled, meeting Loki’s eyes. “And he’s welcome at my home, if he would like. Thanks for the food.” 

Then Peter grabbed his sandwich, his candy, and left the deli with a polite goodbye.

When he looked back, Loki was standing on the counter and watching him walk away. 

Peter thought he might have been smiling. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> YAYAYAYAYAYAYAYAY! They talked! They smiled! They found each other! The sad breakup music no longer plays in the background of Peter chapters!
> 
> XD Woot. I'll see y'all soon! Thanks for reading!


	34. Crueler for its Simplicity

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Loki didn’t come.

Saturday morning greeted Peter with a beam of aggressive sunlight and a good dose of complete terror as he realized that tonight was the dance. It was the sort of lingering anxiousness that you felt behind your kidneys up into your stomach, the kind that could have just been hunger or full bowels or something easier to ease.

Peter sat up, hand fisting on his chest. The fading nightmare didn’t help with his twisting chest; he’d woken yet again from the screams of the people he’d killed in the warehouse that day. The comforters slid off his legs, and the chill of the room sent goosebumps down his arms. 

Like he had everyday for the past week, Peter glanced toward the window. 

No small creature tapped against it. No god curled in its open crook. 

Peter told himself he wasn’t disappointed. He’d made it quite clear that he couldn’t help Loki with his quest anymore, and there truly was no time to waste saving the world. No time to waste on him. 

He should be glad he hadn’t seen Loki. He should be thankful he’d seen him long enough to apologize, and have his words accepted, before Loki had sought the next step. But just because he’d accepted that his role in this quest, as Spider-Man, was over, didn’t mean he’d made peace with it. 

Didn’t mean that he didn’t miss his friend. 

Peter closed the cracked window with a sigh. Then he ambled into the bathroom to take a shower and get ready for his perfectly normal, perfectly average high-school night. 

* * *

 

At the precise moment Peter’s hot water began to trickle down the drain, Loki Odinson was dodging six shots and frantically trying to find enough concentration to manifest his knives. 

It had taken him about three days to remember that he was human, or something like it. Peter’s words had helped, infinitely, but he still hadn’t found his voice that day in the deli. The words he should have said as Peter poured his heart out were still stuck in his throat. They were hard to swallow through.

But Loki couldn’t return, couldn’t even remember how to leave his cat’s body until just hours before. When he had reached hesitantly for his humanoid form, he’d tumbled into it in the back alley behind Delmar’s with something too close to pain. Trembling, he’d returned as quickly as he’d left. 

The fear had come not long after. The pressing grip of the promise of failure, keeping seeing Peter from becoming so much as a possibility. 

He had to prove himself again. To the universe, to himself. Had to find  _ some  _ reason that maybe, just maybe, all hope wasn’t lost for this universe. 

On the garbage can behind a deli restaurant, a cat plotted how to save the universe.

And it started, as it would end, with Tony Stark.

Loki needed to talk to the man. No more dodging out of fear and the knowledge that he wouldn’t be trusted, no more manipulative planning to try and control every aspect of the conversation. Straight and true, Loki needed to talk to Stark. 

But he was still likely to be killed on sight, so an amount of forethought was indeed necessary. Loki needed leverage, needed proof that he was to be believed, and the only resources he had were those of the weapons dealers. 

Who apparently had forgotten that they worked for him. 

Hissing, Loki split his image, throwing an illusion of human form before ricocheting his true consciousness into his raven’s wings. He fluttered up and against the lair’s roof, watching as his double dodged streaks of purple and red energy.

Then he tucked his pinions to the sky and dived. 

He landed behind Toomes, who’d exited his wingsuit a few minutes before. Loki’d been lurking against the containment crates at the time. Now, the man was double-handing a pair of wicked looking guns, which Loki would be quite wary of if they were pointed in his true direction.

Loki hopped toward Toomes’ ankles, sending his illusion dancing out of the way of yet another blast. When he was sure the man was looking away, Loki pulled at his magic and stood into his human form, knives flashing in his hands. 

They were pressed against Toomes’ neck in milliseconds. Loki’s illusion fizzled out of existence, and a few cries of surprise echoed through the warehouse.

“You seem to have forgotten something rather important,” Loki hissed. The blades in his hands bit just a little deeper. “I own you.”

“You brought the Avengers down upon us.” Toomes’ growl was angry, but the trembling of his form betrayed his mortal fear. “You killed our men, good men.”

“That was clumsy execution and the inconvenient actions of a hero I didn’t expect to be there,” Loki said easily.

“You’re plans are crazy.  _ Crazy.” _

“So they are.” Loki pulled one of his knives away from Toomes’ throat, tossing it in his hand. “Seems to me you have plenty of your own, now,” he added, glancing pointedly around the space.

“Now that Tony Stark is on our tail, what other choice to we have?” someone called from the back. Mason. “We’re going after the big one, and you’re  _ ‘help’  _ is not appreciated.”

Loki scoffed. “You think I’m here to offer assistance? No, I’m here to take it from you.”

People hefted their weapons, and Loki’s knife nicked along Toomes’ jaw and neck. A gasp of pain escaped the man, and his few remaining minions paused. 

“Easy, easy,” Loki purred. “Just a bit of information, a gadget, and then I’m on my way.”

“What do you want?”

“Better.” Loki crossed one leg behind the other. “An address. Outside Queens; a no-man’s land you use for operations.”

“Anything  _ specific?”  _ Toomes hissed sarcastically.

Loki tolerated the insolence like the patient Asgardian he was. “Unpopulated surroundings, an open landscape if you possess anything of the sort.”

Toomes was silent for a moment; a quick jab of the knife made sure it was in thought. 

“There’s an industrial park in Brooklyn,” the man said finally. 

“Good,” Loki said, one knife melting into nothingness. “Address?”

Toomes provided it. 

_ “Thank you,”  _ Loki said, an eye roll in his voice. “Now I’m going to need a section of the Iron Man armor you made off with.”

A protest built in Toomes’ throat—Loki could feel it against his blade—and continued before it could make itself known. “Not the whole thing, just a section. I made it happen, giving me a percentage is basic manners.” He said the last just to watch the men bristle helplessly. 

No one moved, and Loki heaved an exaggerated sigh. “This would all be a great deal easier if I didn’t have to make good on my threats. Believe me, I would be happy to, but there’s few of you as it is, and I doubt eliminating a few more would do you any good.”

He hurled a blade through the gap between the nearest man’s shoulder and neck. He recognized the guy; it was the brute from the very first night of all this chaos. 

The brute jumped, then hauled ass to carry out Loki’s request. Without checking with his superior first, Loki noted with a hint of a smirk.  _ That’s right, I’m in charge Midgardians. _

The section of armor was small and sleek, and Loki thought it must have come from the arm of the suit. Red and silver, it was a different design from the one Loki’d gotten to know up close and personal in 2012. The material was different, too. The inside was padded with something dark and comfortable, but the outside seemed almost iridescent in its makeup. Loki wouldn’t have identified it as Earth-indigenous, if he hadn’t been holding it in his free hand. 

Earth had truly come a long way.  _ Stark  _ had come a long way.

Loki tucked the bit of tech into his tunic with the Stone and the list, jostling Toomes a bit with his other knife for good measure.  “I’m going to release you now,” he said, turning back to his captive. “And we’re all going to play nice when I do, allow me to make my exit, and nobody has to get hurt.”

The warehouse was silent. 

“Was I not  _ CLEAR?”  _ Loki’s voice climbed to an echoing roar on the last word, and people flinched from the force of it alone. 

“Yes,” Mason called from the back, and Toomes echoed it. “Yes sir.”

Loki tried not to revel in that ‘sir’, dematerializing his other knife and stepping back. No one shot at him, thankfully; he wouldn’t want to have to break his promise to the spider boy. 

He didn’t look back at the measly group of criminals when he coasted out of the warehouse on onyx feathers. With luck, he wouldn’t have to look at them ever again. 

 

 

Nothing looked twice at the raven perched on the gutter of a Brooklyn industrial park, an inky stain against the sky at his back. Piercing green and alight with determination, Loki’s beady eyes roamed across the buildings and open spaces around him.

The structures weren’t lit and he saw no vehicles gathered on the roads around the park, and had to admit that Toomes had given him something nearly perfect with that address. All that was left was Stark.

Only Stark. That would be a problem; Loki alone couldn’t fight two Iron Man suits and an Infinity Stone. He couldn’t fight just the Infinity Stone. He needed Stark minus the entourage, but he couldn’t fathom the man willingly approaching a sworn enemy without backup, or at least the capability for it. Perhaps Stark could be goaded into doing so, but Loki was unwilling to rely on that possibility. 

Loki lifted a wing, preening the feathers beneath it as he thought. If Stark wouldn’t come willingly, Loki would have to force him, order him. To order you needed leverage, and for leverage you needed respect, trust, or fear. Anger, unfortunately, just didn’t cut it. 

Loki flared his wings, dismissing any chance of action based off respect or trust. And he wasn’t sure Stark truly feared him, not in the way that would give a threat any weight. 

If Loki couldn’t make Stark fear for himself, then, well, he’d make him fear for someone else. 

Wings fluttering in satisfaction, Loki hopped along the edge of the roof. His claws clicked on the aging metal. 

It was time to write a letter. Not that he understood the Midgardian mail system, but he didn’t have to. All he needed was a postman, a knife, and a threat.

He took to the air, his pinions ruffled in the wind, and coasted back toward the heart of Brooklyn. Composing the message in his head, he kept an eye trained on the streets beneath him. The only paper he had was the list. He needed to get more somewhere, and going through the hassle of locating and stealing some seemed a waste of precious time.

So Loki ended up scribbling on a scrap of paper that may have once been white, with a pen that was probably not broken at one point. He curled against the air conditioning unit on the roof of yet another building, huddling in its shade while pressed up against the warm metal. His humanoid form could feel the shard of Iron Man armor pressing into his side, and wondered how it was reacting to the presence of an Infinity Stone.

Loki’d been in extended proximity to the objects of power before, but the Time Stone felt different. The taste of its aura was something unique from the Space Stone, almost spicy in Loki’s chest. Tangy. Like Peter’s cinnamon, but without the cooling sugar to calm the intensity. 

Loki carefully moved his tunic so the Stone, list, and armor weren’t jabbing his skin, and returned to his filthy writing materials. 

The result was readable, perhaps even elegant in the way he’d constructed the runes. Stark obviously could read them, or at least translate them, so Loki figured he wouldn’t have to magic himself any ability to write in this Midgardian dialect.

He folded the note as neatly as was possible with its ripped and uneven edges. Turning his eyes to the edges of the roof, he scoured the shingles for the final touch of his order, more a symbol than anything else. It didn’t take long to find.

Spiders were everywhere in the city, after all. 

Loki gathered as much of the cobweb as he could find, pressing it within the note and trying to make sure it was obvious. The webbing didn’t provide nearly as much visual punch as he would have liked, but he could work with it.

Short, all the crueler for its simplicity, Loki’s note would find itself in the Compound’s mailbox in the early afternoon. It would be read in the late evening.

And it would be abandoned on a workshop table with brutal calm moments later. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> tOTALLY NORMAL, AVERAGE NIGHT MMM YEs WHAT COULD HAPPEN--
> 
> Me: *literally only uses Loki's ability to shape-shift and manifests knives explicitly in this fic*  
> Me: oH YEAH ILLUSIONS--
> 
> Thanks for reading XD! Hope you enjoyed.


	35. Fished

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had no idea what to call this chapter.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Peter’s fingers were almost squeaking on the clear plastic of the box in his hand as he forced himself to take even steps toward the door before him. The walk seemed so much longer when no music blared from the windows and no lights whirred from under the door, when Ned didn’t walk beside him and Loki wasn’t waiting on the roof. His spidey-sense tingled in his gut.

The corsage was pink, and Peter’s suit was black, and the door was too close and too far away. Peter paused, turning to look back at the driveway. May waved him on encouragingly though the window.

Peter blew out a breath and continued up the steps to Liz’s door. He imagined her answering, imagined how beautiful she’d look, imagined what he’d say and how he’d feel. This was all so new, so exciting. 

With nervous hands, he rang the doorbell, then stepped back to wait. It didn’t take long; a man grinned at Peter from the frame as the door swung open. 

Peter’s spidey-sense went into overdrive. 

“You must be Peter,” said the man. His grin was friendly, but Peter’s spidey-sense was pounding, was  _ deafening,  _ what was going on—

“Yes,” Peter managed. 

“I’m Liz’s dad.” He extended a hand. “Adrian Toomes.”

The expression melted off Peter’s face.

_ No.  _

That couldn’t be—he was a different person. He had to be, he  _ had  _ to be; Peter’s date’s dad could not be the flying vulture guy. He just couldn’t. That wasn’t—it couldn’t— _ no. _

But Peter’s heart was hammering to the beat of his spidey sense, and the shape of Toomes’ face was the same, the angle of his jaw was the same, he  _ was the same. _

Frozen, Peter tried to think.

“Put ‘er there,” Toomes said, drawing Peter’s attention back to his extended hand.

Haltingly, Peter shook his enemy’s hand, swallowing the knot of disbelief in his throat. 

“Hell of a grip,” the man complimented. “Come on in, come on.”

Peter allowed himself to be pulled inside, his mind whirring in overdrive. All he could do was fix his attention on Toomes, so easy, so normal in this house. Peter trailed him into the kitchen, where another adult was waiting—one Peter thankfully didn’t recognize. 

“Hi, Peter. You look very handsome,” crooned the woman. Peter assumed she must be Liz’s mother. 

“Thank you,” he managed, cursing himself for how flat his voice sounded. 

He was hyperfocused on the Vulture, so his enhanced hearing picked up every murmur to his wife. She was making sure Toomes knew Peter’s name. 

So usual. So expected. So  _ normal. _

“I’m gonna go get Liz,” the woman explained on the end of a chuckle. 

“Okay.”

Toomes was starting to polish the kitchen knives as his wife disappeared. Peter tensed, his fingers itching into their web-shooting positions, not that it would do any good. 

“You okay, Pete?” Toomes asked, genuinely concerned. 

“Yeah.”

Toomes picked up another knife. “Because you look pale. You want something to drink? Like a bourbon or a scotch, or something like that?”

On autopilot, Peter replied, “I’m not old enough to drink.”

There was a wicked, scabbed scratch along the man’s neck and jaw. Toomes’ collar was pulled up over it, but Peter could distinguish it when he moved.

“That’s the right answer,” Toomes began, before his eyes widened at something before him. “Wow.”

Peter turned.

His emotions exploded again, this time because of the young woman gliding toward them. Liz wore a dress the color of ripe strawberries, pleated and gorgeous, and it hung from her slim frame with the sort of presence that truly was royal. There was nervousness on her face, but not in her stance. She looked breathtaking. 

“Wow, wow, wow. Do you look beautiful…” Toomes sighed, nearly beaming with paternal pride.

“Please don’t embarrass me, Dad.” Liz chuckled nervously, sliding over toward Peter. He was caught between watching her and keeping his eyes on her criminal mastermind of a father.

Toomes made the decision for him by asking, “Doesn’t she, Pete?”

“Yeah, you look really good,” Peter said, and it sounded distracted and strangled and he cursed himself  _ again. _

Toomes smiled. “Once again, that’s the right answer.”

Cutting through the awkwardness growing on them all, Liz asked, “is that a corsage?”

Peter couldn’t take his eyes off Toomes. He abruptly jabbed the plastic box in Liz’s direction, and she took it from his grip. 

Toomes said, “Well, hey, I’m your chauffeur, so let’s get this show on the road.”

But Liz’s mother stepped forward. “No, no, no, no, we have to take some pictures, babe,” she protested, waving them all into formation. “Oh, right here. Perfect.”

“Mom,” Liz hissed.

Like any parent when it came to awkward pictures on an important night, Liz’s mother ignored her daughter. “Come on, you guys. Peter, closer.”

Peter obliged, unable to look away from his enemy as the click of photos jolted through his hyperfocused senses.

Stepping away, finally, Peter found words. “Sir, you don’t have to drive us.”

“No, no, it’s not a big deal,” grinned Toomes. “I’m going out of town. It’s right on my way.”

Liz, now at her mother’s side to check the photo quality, said, “he’s always coming and going.”

“Last time,” promised Toomes, and Peter’s muscles tightened like bed springs.

Peter was out of the house and in his enemy’s car before he knew it, before he could do anything to stop it. The drive to school wasn’t long, but Peter was already counting his every heartbeat, and couldn’t imagine another second in this vehicle.

At least Liz was beside him, using her phone camera to examine how the pink corsage looked against her dress. But the blissful silence couldn’t last forever.

“What are you gonna do, Pete?” Toomes asked.

Peter jumped a bit. “What?”

“When you graduate, what do you think you’re gonna do?”

He couldn’t answer that question  _ normally,  _ let alone stuck in a car with a guy who’d tried to kill him. “I, uh, I dunno.”

“Don’t grill him, Dad,” Liz laughed, looking up from her phone.

“Just saying, you know!” her father grinned. “All you guys who go to that school, you pretty much have your life planned out, right?”

Peter muttered something about being a sophomore, resisting the urge to bring his knees up to his chest and hug them defensively. 

Liz said, “Peter has an internship with Tony Stark. So I think he doesn’t have to worry.” 

_ Shit. _ As if this couldn’t get any more complicated.

Toomes pried eagerly, sounding interested, but there was an edge to his voice. Peter didn’t think it was suspicion, but he imagined the man would be angry; at Stark, at Spider-Man, at everyone involved in the warehouse fire that had…

That had killed so many.

Before the conversation could explode beyond Peter’s control, he choked out, “Yeah, actually, I don’t intern for him anymore.”

There was a pause.

“Seriously?” Liz said with a frown.

Peter fished. “Yeah, it got… boring?”

“It was boring? You got to hang out with Spider-Man!” 

That had Toomes perking up, something dark flickering across his gaze. For the first time, Peter could picture him in that wing-suit. “Really? Spider-Man? Wow. What’s he like?”

Inwardly screaming, Peter squeaked, “Yeah, he’s nice. Nice man. Solid dude.”

_ What the fuck, Peter. _

Liz leaned over to show him an image on her phone. Through the rear view mirror, Toomes was still stealing glances at him, eyes slightly narrowed. 

“I’ve seen you around, right? I mean... Somewhere.” Toomes hummed. “We’ve, uh,  _ have  _ we ever met? Because even the voice…”

Peter’s mind whited out.

And Liz saved his spider’s ass. “He does Academic Decathlon with me.”

“Oh,” said her father, looking back at the road.

“And he was at my party,” Liz added.

Peter searched for something, anything, to say. “It was a great party, really great, yeah. Beautiful house, a lot of windows.”

“You were there for like, two seconds,” Liz laughed.

“That was... I was there longer than two seconds,” Peter protested. 

“You disappeared.”

This conversation was veering into dangerous territory. “No, no. I did not disappear,” Peter tried.

“Yes, you did. You disappeared like you always do. I missed you after DC.”

_ Shit shit shit shit shit— _

Peter didn’t have anything to say to that, and Toomes was watching him again, well and completely suspicious, now.

“That’s terrible, what happened down there in D.C., though,” Toomes said. “Were you scared?”

Peter managed a terse nod.

“Such a powerful explosion, and you held it in your hands. Very brave.”

“Thank you.”

Toomes’ voice was rumbling, slow and thoughtful and terrifyingly understanding. “A miracle you survived.”

“Yeah,” Liz agreed, oblivious to the tension rising in the car. “Peter’s some kind of superhuman!”

Peter tried to laugh in a way that sounded embarrassed and complimented, but it came out anxious and angry instead.

“And then you got better so quick!” Liz continued. Peter’s hands started to shake. 

“Stark… Mr. Stark’s infirmary is really something,” Peter breathed.

Toomes’ lips were quirking into something that might have been a smile if it wasn’t so terrifying. “Good old Iron Man.”

The light before them clicked to green, but Toomes wasn’t watching it. He was staring at Peter, eyes calculating, lips drawn, and Peter knew he’d been discovered as finally as he’d known he could no longer help Loki.

God did he wish Loki was here.

“Dad!” Liz said as car horns began to honk around them. “The light!”

The car whizzed forward again, the remainder of the trip blurring into a half-second. When they arrived, Midtown High was nearly glowing, decor and parking simple and elegant thanks to Liz and her team. Balloons waved lazily in the nighttime breeze, ushering well-dressed students through the large double doors. There were streamers across the doors. Students stood against them, laughing and chatting with friends or dates or new faces, while the soft pulse of music wriggled out from the windows.

“Here we are. End of the line,” said Toomes, and Peter tried not to read too far into it.

“Thanks, Dad.”

Toomes craned around to look at his daughter, though his eyes snagged on Peter for too long a moment. “You head in there, Gumdrop. I’m gonna give Peter the “dad talk.”

Liz looked at Peter apologetically, wincing in sympathy. “Don’t let him intimidate you,” she whispered, then thanked her father and slid out of the car.

Leaving Peter alone, suitless, with Adrian Toomes. 

There was a gun in his head when Toomes turned back over the seat. It rested naturally against his palm, held loosely and far, far too easily. Toomes held it like it wasn’t a threat—like it was a reminder. A truth. 

Peter wondered if Toomes could hear his heartbeat. 

“Does she know?” he said quietly.

“Know what?” Peter shook his head.

“So she doesn’t. Good. Close to the vest; I admire that.” Toomes smiled sickeningly. “I’ve got a few secrets of my own. Of all the reasons I didn’t want my daughter to date…” His laugh was mirthless and short, and Peter felt his hands trembling. 

“Peter, nothing is more important than family,” Toomes began, his fingers twitching on the gun. “You saved my daughter’s life, and I could never forget something like that. So I’m gonna give you one chance. Are you ready?”

Peter didn’t move. He was holding his breath, his chest aching, but he couldn’t seem to release it.

“You walk through those doors, you forget any of this happened,” Toomes growled. “And don’t you ever,  _ ever  _ interfere with my business again. The people you killed? They were relying on me. My daughter is too. And if you get in the way of that, try to stop me again? I’ll kill you and everybody you love. I’ll kill you dead.”

Liz, so kind and loving and responsible and smart. This was her father. 

“That’s what I’ll do to protect my family,” Toomes murmured. “Do you understand?”

Peter couldn’t look at the man. All he could do was breath through the shock of realization sending his fingers creeping to his pocket and slowly, slowly pulling his phone from within it. He nodded. 

“Hey. I just saved your life. Now, what do you say?” 

Peter twitched. There was gloating in that voice, the confidence of someone who knew they’d won, someone who held such power over another that condescension was meaningless. Fury was burning in Peter’s gut as he snapped his eyes to Toomes’ and dropped his phone down behind the seat.

“Thank you,” he growled.

“You’re welcome.” Toomes smiled. “Now, you go in there and you show my daughter a good time, okay? Just not too good.”

Peter didn’t let his face shift as he slid from the car, his thoughts on a loop. He shut the door behind him, lingering for a moment as Toomes kicked the vehicle into gear and drove away. 

Sounds drifted against him fuzzily, muted like he was hearing them underwater as Peter entered the school. Music and voices joined the roars in his head. 

_ Do something. I can stop him, I can end this now. _

_ I can’t. I’m not capable of this, I’m not capable of anything.  _

_ But he’s dangerous. I can save people. _

_ Liz doesn’t deserve this. _

_ Liz… _

The music grew louder, lights reflecting off the glass doors before him. His corsage burned on his lapel, his footsteps too loud against the tile floor of the hall, and Peter stopped. Within the gym, people moved together and separate like a school of fish. He cast his eyes across them. Ned and Abe and MJ lingered by the stereo, and Ned caught his eye and waved. MJ’s greeting turned into the finger after a moment, and Peter swallowed.

_ Do something. _

_ I can’t. _

_ Do something. _

_ I can’t… _

_ … let him go. _

Peter pushed open the doors, and chatter ad the lyrics of pop songs assaulted his ears. It was easy to spot Liz, luminescent in the rose of her dress, and Peter felt weightless, disconnected as he made his way over to her.

“Hey!” she said, smiling and turning to him. “What did he say to you?”

He stared at her, fighting with the words as they climbed up his throat. The smile dropped from her face, and it was like a sock to the gut for Peter as he forced himself to say, “Gotta go. I’m, I’m sorry. You don’t deserve this.”

And then he turned, and he left the gym. 

 

 

 


	36. Observation One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :D

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Beneath the third locker bay in the far West hallway of Midtown Science and Tech, a spider had stowed his hoard. It was still lying in a haphazard pile as Peter lifted the bay with a grunt, his knuckles whitening on the metal, and kicked the cloth from its dusty prison. 

He threw the hoodie and pants on over his clothes. His suitcoat was left haphazardly in his own locker, but that was the only stop Peter made has he hauled ass toward the back door of the school. Fumbling with his web shooters, Peter threw the door open with his hip. 

He took the stairs two at a time, the school buses resting like slumbering beasts in the abandoned parking lot. Grimacing, he went to round one, pulling at his clothes. He hadn’t worn these old pajamas in months.

Steps speeding, Peter was darting around a school bus when the first shock struck him directly between his shoulder blades. 

He let out a shocked cry, sprawling onto the asphalt. Pebbles ripped against the skin of his palms and pressed into his knees, and he scrambled backwards as he craned to see his attacker.

To his surprise, he recognized the man. He couldn’t remember if a name had ever been spoken, but he could identify his attacker by his build and face—the brute from beneath the highway overpass two weeks ago. Electricity still crackled around the weapon in his hand, and Peter recognized that too, in both look and pain. The bearded man had shot Peter with it, before Loki’d saved him.

Not for the last time, Peter wished Loki was here. 

“He gave you a choice,” said Brute. Peter assumed he was speaking of Toomes. “You chose wrong.”

Peter shook the haze of pain from his mind, pushing himself upward. “Ah, what the hell?”

Brute regarded him, looking incredulous as Peter’s fingers widened with the realization that they were no longer holding the web-shooter. “What’s with the crappy costume?”

The weapon in Brute’s hand buzzed as he cocked it again, taking aim. Peter burst into action, sprinting for his fallen shooter near Brute’s feet, but a swipe from the shocker sent a school bus  _ rolling  _ into him.

Now horizontal again, Peter could only hiss as Brute kicked his web-shooter away. 

“I wasn’t sure about this thing at first, but damn,” the man said, glancing approvingly at the gauntlet over his fist. It’s glowing maw stared Peter down again—

A  _ thump  _ echoed through the parking lot.

Brute crumpled like a sack of potatoes, a moan escaping his lips. 

And behind him stood a supremely pissed off Michelle Jones, both hands clutching a hardcover novel with the corner of its spine now slightly bashed in. 

Peter gaped.

“He’s not unconscious, idiot,” Michelle said, kicking at the fallen man as he twisted, disoriented. “Didn’t want to kill him or cause brain damage.”

“Michelle? What are you—”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Michelle swiped the web-shooter from where it had skittered beneath a bus wheel, eyeing it calculatingly. In less than five seconds, she had discharged it cleanly to stick Brute to the pavement. 

“Who—?” the man began, blinking fuzzily.

Michelle fired off a second shot and bound his mouth shut. 

Peter goggled just a bit further.

Turning to him, Michelle blew her frizzing hair out of her face and cocked her head. “Well then. What in all hell do you think you’re doing, Peter?”

Peter stood shakilly, glancing at her and at his embarrassingly ragged clothing— _ Spider-Man clothing.  _ “I’m—this isn’t… this isn’t what you think—”

Michelle rolled her eyes and tossed him his web-shooter. “Don’t even start, Arachnid-Boy. I know who you are.”

Peter’s panic must have been tangible, for Michelle shrugged in the direction of the school and said, “don’t worry, no one else knows. Except your dumbass of a buddy. He should be making an entrance soon.”

As if her words had summoned him, the door of the school banged open to reveal Ned scrambling from the building. 

He froze when he saw them, Peter still masked and Michelle standing easily before the struggling body of their enemy. 

“Hey, Leeds,” Michelle said. “Took you long enough.”

“What—Peter? Is that you?”

Michelle answered before Peter could. “Who else would it be?”

Peter’s shock finally broke, and he shook himself, pulling up his goggles and mask so he could see the other students better. “Did you tell her?” he demanded.

Ned shook his head mutely. 

“You’re incredibly obvious,” Michelle sighed. “And you’re an asshole, leaving Liz high and dry like that.” 

Peter gestured helplessly toward the man on the ground. “There’s—there was—”

“I’m messing with you, don’t worry. Although it is true.” 

Michelle stepped over the brute, joining Ned on the steps of the school. She leaned against the banister and regarded them with raised eyebrows. Peter and Ned could only stare.

“Well?” she finally prompted.

“What?” Peter secured the web-shooter to his wrist, shaking out his hands and looking back to his friend. He shifted his weight between his feet and glanced between Ned and Michelle.

“Aren’t you going to explain?” Michelle crossed her arms. “Don’t you have some reason for being a terrible friend and a worse date?” 

“It’s not any of your—”

“If you finish that sentence,” Michelle cut him off, “I will introduce  _ your  _ head to this copy of  _ Human Bondage.” _

Peter, wisely, didn’t argue. He glanced at Ned, who shrugged, and when he finally relented, half of Michelle’s mouth was quirking into a smile.

“The guy with the wings is Liz’s dad,” Peter said. “He’s the one stealing from Damage Control, putting together the high-tech weapons.”

Michelle hummed, and Ned vibrated. “What? Really?”

Peter nodded, glancing back toward the road. Urgency thrummed in his throat, and he shuffled away from the school a bit. “I know. I gotta tell Mr. Stark. Could you… yeah, call Happy Hogan. He’s Mr. Stark’s head of security. And, uh, get a computer to track my phone for me.”

“On it,” Michelle said, as Ned wondered, “Are you gonna be okay?”

Peter, nodding, sent a strand of webbing toward the nearest streetlight and swung himself around its base. The resistance was strange and the angle imprecise; there was no way Peter was going to catch up to Toomes like this.

“Hurry, we gotta catch him before he leaves town,” was Peter’s response. 

He practically fell off the streetlight as he tried to make his way around the school. Yeah, this definitely wasn’t going to work; he needed another way across town. 

* * *

 

This, Michelle Jones was quick to conclude as she sprinted down the Midtown Hallway aside a waddling Ned, was the best Homecoming she’d ever had the misfortune to participate in. 

“So he told you, then?” Ned coughed. They slid into the nearest computer lab, not bothering to flick on the lights, and found seats in the center of the middle row.

Observation one: Ned hadn’t even paused when they entered the room, making a beeline straight for the center. Observation two: he opened the computer he chose with ease, typing in his student number and password without so much as a pause in his fingers. Conclusion: Ned Leeds had a habitual computer as a result of repeated use of the computer lab.

MJ scoffed, logging into another computer beside him. “He didn’t tell me, I figured it out.”

“Really?” Ned glanced at her. 

“It’s kind of obvious.”

“What about Loki?”

MJ paused, her fingers suspended over the left click of her mouse. “What about who?”

“Uh,” Ned stuttered. “Nothing, nevermind, forget I said anything.”

Ned Leeds was part of the reason Peter was so obvious, if MJ was being honest. And she tended to be so. 

The boy was saved from her interrogation by the twitter of his phone, an unknown number flashing across the screen. Answering it on speaker, they heard Peter’s voice through the roar of wind. 

“Hello, Ned? Hey, hey, hey, hey, can you hear me?”

“Go for Ned,” said the boy with a shit-eating grin.

Observation one: the sound of the wind over the phone was loud and fast, like it was through open car windows. Observation two: traffic behind Peter’s call. Observation three: an unknown caller ID on Ned’s phone. Determinant one: Flash was the only kid who drove a convertable who hadn’t arrived at the dance yet. 

Conclusion: Peter’d stolen Flash’s car, phone, and quite possibly dignity.

MJ, smirking to herself, opened Chrome on her recently awoken computer. She kept an ear out for Ned and Peter’s conversation as she nonchalantly began a google search. 

Determinant two: Peter was fifteen. Corollary from conclusion: he was going to need help driving that expensive vehicle.

“Ned, I need you to track my phone for me,” Peter called. Another screech echoed through the phone line and MJ winced. 

“Yeah,” Ned hummed, already flying through code MJ couldn’t read, “but where is it?”

“I left in the backseat of the vulture-guy’s car,” Peter said, and MJ couldn’t help but nod, impressed.

“Genius move,” Ned admitted. He was squinting at a map, consisting exclusively of roads and a key in purely numbered code. A red dot labeled ‘Peter’s phone’ was pulsing down one of the roads, and MJ took a moment to try and figure out which road it was before Ned told them. 

“Okay, he just passed the GameStop on Jackson Avenue,” reported Ned.

MJ leaned into the phone. “The headlights are the round nob to the left of the steering wheel,” she drawled. “Turn it clockwise.”

“Michelle?” Peter sounded as if he was actually surprised she was still there.

MJ rolled her eyes, clicking back to her diagram of Flash’s convertible. It was times like this that she couldn’t quite remember why she was attracted to this dumbass. 

Which was not relevant at the moment, and she’d already drawn all the conclusions she could from  _ that  _ little determinant. 

“Did you turn them on?” she barked by way of answer. 

“Uh, yeah, uh, thanks.”

Ned glanced at the phone, giving MJ an unconscious thumbs up. She returned it with finger-guns, though she was quite aware the boy wasn’t paying attention. “You’re in a car?” Ned wondered.

“Flash’s, yeaAAAAAAH!” he trailed off into a screech, and the sound of tires abruptly swerving made both Michelle and Ned flinch. “Get out of the way, get out of the way! Move! Move!”

“Are you okay?” Ned hissed.

“Yeah, uh I’ve never really driven before. Only with May in parking lots. This is a huge step up…” 

MJ couldn’t remember the last time she’d actually been in a car. But she could bicycle anywhere and everywhere, and was the absolute goddess of public transportation; she had work to get to after school, and was the coworker who would cover for anyone, at anytime. Anything to stay out of that house. 

“Who was it,” she began, but Peter’s shocked scream as another car got close to hitting him cut her off. She sighed the long-suffering sigh she’d reserved for these idiots and continued. “Who was it you wanted us to call?”

“Happy Hogan. Are you through to him yet?”

“Obviously not,” MJ tried not to snap. 

“Working on it,” Ned said simultaneously. “I just gotta backdoor the phone system.” He pulled up another box in the corner of whatever program he was in— _ note to self: learn the basics of JavaScript for future reference _ —and went to work. His rapid keystrokes and confident coding had him hacking into the system in what felt like the blink of an eye.

When MJ looked away from the screen, Ned was grinning. He muttered something under his breath that sounded like ‘guy in the chair’ before a call box blinked into existence on the screen. 

“Take off in nine minutes,” said a voice, before the owner turned to face the camera in his phone.

Observation one: the man, Happy Hogan, was dressed in a crisp suit and black tie. Observation two: the building around him was awkwardly lit, with blinding lights in some places but shadows in the others, suggesting size. Observation three: he was surrounded by boxes. Conclusion: he was catching a flight.

 “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” the man demanded, his face scrunched into something stressed and angry.

Determinant one: he was an employee of Stark industries. Determinant two: Stark was moving to a new facility upstate, as MJ’d heard on the news. Conclusion: the flight Happy was catching stored a load of tech more advanced than half the world put together, and he was stressed beyond any semblance of sanity.

Conclusion two: this wasn’t going to go well.

“Mr. Happy, it’s Ned,” Ned said, pulling himself close to the camera to try and look earnest.

“Who?”

_ Don’t introduce yourself, just tell him!  _ MJ couldn’t but into the phone call now; Ned needed all the professionability he could cultivate, but he was going to screw this up anyway. 

“I’m an associate of Peter Parker. Got something very important to tell you—”

“You’ve got to be shitting me,” Happy scoffed, and hung up.

_ Conclusion validated.  _

“Damn,” Ned sighed. 

MJ rolled her eyes, reaching across Ned’s keyboard to grab his phone and ignoring his protests. “Peter, your phone’s stopped in an old industrial park in Brooklyn.”

“What?” came the boy’s somewhat muffled voice. “That doesn’t make sense. I thought he said he was going out of town!”

“Probably because there’s a Stark Industries jet about to take off, stocked to the brim with high-tech materials,” MJ said flatly.

There was a silence, and then Peter cursed vehemently. “Shit, it’s moving day. He’s gonna rob that plane! I gotta stop him!”

“Yeah, that’d probably be a good idea.” MJ let the sarcasm drip off her tongue and set the phone back onto the table. She turned down the volume for a moment; Peter would need to concentrate on driving.

Ned was staring at his screen somewhat blankly when MJ looked up, his expression twisted into a thoughtful frown. Observation one: his eyes weren’t flickering. Conclusion: he wasn’t focused on the phone tracker, instead considering something else. 

“What is it?” MJ demanded. 

“I… have an idea,” Ned said. His fingers flew to his phone, pulling something from the pocket in the back of the case. 

MJ narrowed her eyes. Ned was cradling an old receipt like it was some sort of treasure, peering at it as though reading the data it contained. 

When he started typing again, MJ found herself without any conclusions.

That was, until another call box popped up on the screen. 

And this one contained the dangerously cold gaze of Anthony Stark. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THREE CHEERS FOR A MJ PERSPECTIVE!!! I didn't realize she was gonna end up so organized and evaluative in her thoughts, but she did, and I sort of like it. Hope you do, too! 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Tune in next time for some chaos and a cliffhanger resolution! (Sorry about that XD)


	37. What he Does Not Want

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki I swear to god--

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

Tony almost threw it away.

He didn’t emerge from the far edge of the Compound until late afternoon, so the pile of mail on the table didn’t surprise him. Tired but satisfied from a session with the Accords council, Tony’d been unwilling to go through the stack until after he’d snacked on something more substantial than coffee. He expected an update from Happy momentarily, too. Moving day was upon them, and Happy was turning it into a  _ far  _ bigger deal than it needed to be. 

Or maybe Tony was just underestimating its impact. He didn’t really care. 

Settling onto a bench in the kitchen, Tony tossed an apple in one hand and considered the empty area. Vision, the only one still currently living in Avengers quarters, had disappeared the day before. The android did that sometimes. 

He always came back dreamy and distracted, baking too many cookies and talking non-stop to FRIDAY. So Tony was pretty sure he knew where Vision went. 

Maybe someday he’d need to address it, for better or for worse. But for now, Tony was happy to just let the android be in love. 

Smiling a bit, Tony took a bite of fruit and reached for the mail.

The note was so scrappy, so torn, that Tony assumed it was trash at first, collected and accidentally retained in the mail pile by one of the interns. He picked it up with a frown, noting the way it had been precisely folded over itself, though the edges were untidy and dark with grime. Tony turned it over in his palm. 

There were runes on the front. 

Tony dropped the sliver of paper on instinct, his fingers working as though burned by its contact. The shape of the glyphs was unmistakable. 

The taste of apple suddenly bitter in his mouth, Tony swallowed hard and stood. He needed to get back to the lab, needed FRIDAY and her database of translation, needed to  _ know what this said. _ His brisk stalk down the hallway went uninterrupted by Compound inhabitants, for which he was grateful. 

As he walked, Tony folded the note open along the precise crease between its ragged edges. The runes within were few, but they weren’t what drew Tony’s attention.

No, Tony stared at the tiny gossamer threads pressed between the note’s folded edges.

Spider-silk.

Tony was running, now.

“FRIDAY,” he called, his footsteps ringing through the empty hallway.

He was still so relieved when she answered. “Yes?” 

“Asgardian translator.”

She didn’t have to respond for him to know she was pulling in onto the nearest screen in the nearest lab. “What is it boss?”

Tony glanced at the note in his palm, forcing his breathing into an even rhythm. “Nothing good,” he replied. 

As he raced the final curves toward his workshop, Tony tried to keep a hold of his thoughts. Part of him still prayed he was just being paranoid, that the webbing was a coincidence and the runes were a threat and nothing more. They stuck to his palm as he closed his fist and  _ ran. _

FRIDAY was already scanning when Tony skidded into the room, holding the note up so FRIDAY’s camera could snag the symbols. On the closest screen, the loading sign turned over once, twice. 

_ I HAVE HIM.  _

It listed an address, one FRIDAY was already pinpointing.

_ COME ALONE, OR I WILL LEAVE WHAT IS LEFT OF HIM BENEATH YOUR PRECIOUS EARTH. _

Tony stared at the letters. Stared at the runes, at the spider’s webbing coated purposefully across the surface of the grimy paper.  

And every one of the restraints he’d locked into place after the Civil War snapped free. 

The icy, endless rage that swept through him in that moment wiped away everything except the address in his mind and the plan he could already see unfolding in brutal clarity. Tony set the note down, fingers still and precise, and stepped back with composed movements.

He breathed.

His voice was calm when he ordered FRIDAY to send the armor, the most recent after the model destroyed in the garage fire. Everything was calm—a frozen, killing calm.

He breathed. 

 In the corner of the workshop, a ruby and navy suit winked at him. A confiscated weapon, a useless defense to a boy he’d rendered vulnerable.

He breathed. 

Then he moved. He flew.

It was dark outside the Compound, the black cut through with the residue of his repulsors catching the light pollution. FRIDAY was speaking to him, flashing instructions on the visor of the suit, and Tony listened. He read, and he flew, and he heard his heartbeat like a battle drum within his soul. 

Brooklyn. He needed to get to Brooklyn, and he needed to do it four hours ago. 

His thoughts and sight were sharpening. As the trees of upstate New York passed beneath him, Tony became consciously aware of two things.

One, that Rhodes was halfway across the state in his own home, managing his career, and though he would come at any word from Tony, he would not get here in time.

And two, that Tony didn’t want Peter Parker to die. 

He’d always known that, of course. He didn’t want anyone to die, and actively sought to prevent it. But now, the out-of-date suit snug against his body, Tony knew it vigorously, insistently, poignantly. It snapped into his perception like an old rubber-band finally breaking through the elastic denial that held it together.

He wanted the kid alive. He would do everything, anything, to keep him as such, to keep that optimistic energy coursing through this world for as long as possible. The world would be lesser without it.

Now, with a life in his hands, with  _ ‘leave what’s left of him’  _ roaring against his subconscious, Tony was very, very aware of that simple fact.

He did not want Peter Parker to die. 

He did not want him to go. 

Tony’s saliva tasted like ash, and he shook himself, trying to focus back on the sounds of the suit and the New York horizon before him. His hands felt dry, felt coated in something dead and flaking. There was a pain in his abdomen, phantom and nauseating, and Tony hissed quietly.

“Boss,” FRIDAY said, her voice just as controlled as Tony’s must have been. “Incoming call from Ned Leeds.”

Tony closed his eyes. 

Then he pushed his repulsors faster, ricocheting through the sky like something born of stars. His fingers twitched, but his palms never broke their orientation. 

“Answer,” he said quietly. 

The video box appeared beneath his center of vision, and contained two rather surprised teenagers instead of the single Tony had been expecting. 

“Mr. Stark!” Ned Leeds squeaked, and the girl beside him cleared her throat pointedly. 

“Right, uh,” said Ned, “we tried to contact Mr. Happy, but he didn’t—”

The girl cut him off, squeezing further into the frame. “We have something of immense importance to bring to your attention.”

Tony turned his gaze back to his flight pattern. “How long has he been gone?”

Even the girl looked confused at that. “What?”

“I’m already aware he’s missing. I received the threat minutes ago and am on my way.”

The two teens looked at each other, and Tony swerved into a particularly strong gust of wind, shifting his wrists so it didn’t knock him too far off course. He gritted his teeth. There were far too many unwelcome images of unwanted possibilities filtering through his brain, and Tony diverted more power to the thrusters. 

“I think we may be speaking of different events, sir,” Ned finally said. 

_ Of course you are. _

“Fine, yes,” Tony snapped. “I’ll listen, but for  _ God’s _ —just tell me how long it’s been since either of you heard from Peter.”

They were quick to respond. “We’re on the phone with him right now, Mr. Stark.”

Tony froze. 

Ned continued, sounding justifiably uncomfortable, “did you… is he who you thought was missing?”

In the background, Tony heard a crackling yelp and another voice. “What’s going on over there? Ned, where am I supposed to be going?”

It was Peter’s voice. 

Tony closed his eyes, drawing in a long, deep breath. 

Then he fixed the teenagers in his gaze and asked with tight amusement, “Would somebody please be  _ so kind  _ as to inform me what the  _ everloving fuck is going on?”  _

“Um,” Ned coughed, glancing to the left of the call box like he was looking at something else on the screen. “Well—Peter, you’re coming up on the park, turn right—we found out something about those weapon’s dealers—”

A deafening  _ screech _ echoed from the other line, and all three of them winced. Tony thought he heard Peter’s cry from beneath the chaos.

“Right, turn  _ right!”  _ Ned yelped, nearly dropping the phone.

Tony tried very hard to breathe.

Thankfully, the girl rolled her eyes and moved into the center of the screen, fixing Tony in a calculating gaze. He fixed her right back. In the back of his mind, he wondered who she was, and when she’d learned about Peter’s second life.

“Spider-Man has discovered the identity and destination of a certain weapon’s dealer,” the girl said. “Adrian Toomes is his girlfriend’s father—”

_ Girlfriend? Peter has a—good for him, I suppose. No criminal fathers, though, that’s unacceptable. _

“—and is currently located in an old industrial park—”

Tony clenched his jaw, finishing the girl’s sentence. “In Brooklyn, off 5th.”

“Yes.” She looked a bit surprised, but quickly schooled her face into something neutral and unimpressed, and Tony tried not to raise an eyebrow.

Instead, he sighed and pushed his suit faster. “That’s where I’m headed, too.”

_ ‘Come alone or I will leave what’s left of—’ _

Tony shook his head, holding in a hiss. Loki didn’t have Peter, and that somehow made everything a thousand times more complicated. Because Tony was alone, flying into a trap, having taken the easiest bait in the entire goddamn universe. 

He couldn’t turn back. He couldn’t wait. Peter was crashing his way in a road hazard toward the very area Tony’d been summoned to. Waiting so much as another minute to contact Rhodey… 

Growling, Tony turned his attention back to the call on his visor. “How are you speaking to Parker?” he demanded.

“Um, over the phone…” Ned began. “He’s on a different number.” Leeds craned over his handheld device and began to list off numbers, which FRIDAY collected and began to string together. 

“He’s pulling into the park now, Mr. Stark,” said the girl, her fingers tapping on the edge of the desk. “You might want to hurry.”

“Hang up on him,” Tony said by way of reply. “FRIDAY, call that number.”

Both parties followed his order, and Tony flicked the voice call across the visor so it overlayed his communications box. 

Then his view lit up with a shaft of light that didn’t come from his location. Behind Ned and the new girl—who Tony thought he rather liked—a door was swinging open, and a figure was standing within it like the harbinger of death. Tony winced. 

_ Sorry kids.  _

“Might want to look behind you,” he said. 

Then he glanced over them, met the goggling eyes of the woman in the doorway, saluted, and hung up.

Peter answered not moments later.

“Ned, why’d you—oh heeeey…” He coughed awkwardly, and Tony thought he could hear the guilty defiance in that single word. 

“Why hello, Spider-Man,” he sighed. “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?” 

“Um.” 

Tony’s lip twitched up. His armor was swerving above the Brooklyn area, now; it shouldn’t take much longer to arrive. 

To what, he didn’t know. 

“Someone’s about to rob your plane,” Peter began. His voice was lowered, a sneaking whisper.

“Adrian Toomes, your date’s father. I’ve been informed. I’ve also been informed as to your location, which was where I was headed long before I received your little ground-crew’s communication.”

“What? Why?” Peter still sounded preoccupied, his hiss harsh and vague. “How did you know?”

“Loki’s there.” Tony decided to approach with blunt truth. “You’re climbing into a trap, and you need to wait for me.”

“Loki’s—are you bringing the Avengers?”

Tony was silent for a moment. Then: “there were extenuating circumstances. It’s just me.”

“Oh.” A shuffling background sound Tony couldn’t identify crackled through the helmet. Peter said, “Loki isn’t here. It’s just Toomes.”

“I thought I told you to  _ wait for me?”  _ He couldn’t keep the snap of frustration and the lick of fear from his words. 

“I’m not doing anything, and if I waited he might have gotten away!”

_ And we would have dealt with that when it occurred, not over your dead body. _

“One, that matters exactly not at all; and two, Asgardian magic is a fucking enigma, so I wouldn’t trust your eyes with anything.”

Tony could see the industrial park, now. It was a splash of darkness in the lights of the city, impressively large and satisfactorily empty.

Peter said something, but the words blurred together as the kid tried to stay quiet. 

“Where are you?” Tony hissed.  _ “Exactly?” _

The little widget for the spider-suit showed dead, empty data, and a location in a dusty corner of Tony’s lab. 

“Inside the second largest building, I think.” Peter hummed. “Toomes is just… oh, no, he’s going down a level. There’s a basement? Wicked.”

“Focus.”

“Right. Upper level is filled with all these gadgets and stuff. Super villainous.” The sound of webbing discharging had Tony swooping low toward the approaching buildings. 

Then he froze.

Mere feet before him, a raven was hovering. Nothing but an onyx smear against the navy darkness of the park beneath, the beast was captivating, graceful, dangerous. It’s wings beat circles to stay stationary. Tony met its eyes as it fixed his suit with an unreadable expression, gaze an emerald glow in the dark. 

And Tony knew. 

Peter’s voice continued, speaking of screens targeting the moving plane and Toomes retreat. Finally snapping into action, Tony raised a gauntlet, shifted the other for stabilization, and fired. 

Loki tucked his wings to his sides and dived. Tony’s blast did nothing but illuminate his decent as he shot toward the open plane beside the park, a screech of challenge curling though the air behind him.

“Loki’s here,” Tony breathed, interrupting whatever Peter was saying. “Outside.”

“Go after him, then!” The kid seemed to shrug, as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. 

Tony glanced toward the building where the boy had disappeared. He couldn’t— 

Bullet-resistant makeup, parachute, heater, tracker, wings, weapons, retreat capabilities. All curled in a useless lump in Tony’s workshop, where he’d left them, where he’d taken them, where he’d imprisoned them.

“Mr. Stark,” Peter said quietly, as though he could hear the silence of Tony’s thrusters keeping him stationary. Hell, the boy probably could. “There’s no time, alright?”

“I don’t trust this.” Tony spoke more to himself than to Peter. “I don’t…”

Why would Loki lie about his leverage? Why the kid? Why  _ ‘come alone?’ _

Tony shook his head. “We’re falling right into his trap.”

“We don’t have any other choice.”

“You won’t leave, will you,” Tony said, resignation in his tone.

There was a long pause, and then Peter’s hesitant agreement. “I won’t. Not when I could stop this.”

And hell if Tony didn’t hear everything in those words. He heard the unsure claim, held back from conviction by fear, by the shadow of mistakes made and deaths caused. He heard the insecurity. He heard the adrenaline-fueled excitement, an undeniably addictive thrill that dulled logic in favor of pure, instinctual emotion. 

He heard his own voice, echoing back at him. 

“Alright,” Tony said, dropping unbridled into a descent. “Let’s go get this son of a bitch.”

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OOOPs ANOTHER CLIFF-HANGER


	38. Back Before You Know I'm Gone

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes, I know, I know.... but you're gonna want this chapter, I promise. 
> 
> I hyperscribed (that's a word now) two chapters before school starts tomorrow so NO HARM DONE! Enjoy!

 

**Earth-199999:** **_February 2024_ **

 

When the swirling portal deposited its bedraggled-looking sorcerer onto cobblestones damp from sea spray, the reaction from onlookers was probably what Stephen should have expected. Average residents of a rural fishing town might have stared, screamed, photographed. Stephen was subconsciously preparing himself for this. 

What he got instead was spears and swords, a forest of blades all oriented dangerously toward him. Stephen held in a yelp, closing his portal and raising his hands non-threateningly. 

The citizens of New Asgard did not fuck around. 

“Greetings,” Stephen called, making sure any signs of magic had completely dematerialized. “I come in peace?”

The brandished death threats lowered slightly.

“State your business, wizard!” someone called.

Stephen forcibly restrained himself from lifting a hand to touch behind his ear. “I need to speak to your king. As soon as possible.”

The weapons went up again. Around Stephen’s shoulders, the Cloak stiffened in protective aggression. 

“I need her help,” Stephen explained, containing his sigh. “I fought with her six months ago, there’s  _ no reason  _ to want the King of Asgard dead. You all flatter yourselves.”

Stephen turned his gaze upward to the town around him. The crowd surrounding him was small—he’d portaled into a narrow street he’d found a photo of on the internet, and his only hostiles were civilians going about their business who’d happened to be passing by. Above them, New Asgard was growing.

What had been a ramshackle village of mourners was now an eager, reaching town of multi-story buildings and a budding economy. The homes and shops were stacked in spirals. Arches reached in a strange, ancient elegance from high above all the way to the streets below, strung across with clotheslines and netting, with drying fish and carved wooden sigel's. Every wall Stephen could identify was painted a different, vibrant color, murals and mosaics stretching across the street. He could see children in windows with paint brushes behind their ears. 

It was a beautiful place. But Stephen knew better than to assume the mourning was over, that families didn’t still remember lost children, ancestors, lovers. 

He hadn’t even considered… so many had been killed in Thanos’s raid, including Prince Loki. And then the Desolation, where they lost so many more.

Stephen nodded with a newfound respect and sympathy for the people of Asgard. 

“Nice place,” he said, nodding to the area around them. “You’ve been busy.”

No one answered, or moved, and faces kept their stone-cut snarls. Stephen went to take a step forward, but a warning arrow embedded itself in the street next to his foot, and he froze. 

He had  _ not  _ wanted to fight today…

“Do you just go shopping with your longbows?” he called toward the man in the back who’d shot at him. “What if, I dunno, you need both hands to carry lettuce?”

“Never will a threat take us by surprise again,” someone growled.

Stephen frowned. Then he sighed, nodding. “Okay, yes, that’s fair. But I’m not taking you by surprise, see, I’m introducing myself!”

He went to spread his arms, but the tense threat in the air only grew stronger. Stephen thought better of the movement.

Someone stalked toward him, sword still raised, and set the point directly above where Stephen’s heart was still managing to carry out its purpose. Behind his back, Stephen’s left hand clamped down on the Cloak to keep it from rearing to knock the blade away. His right flicked. The sword shifted,  _ ever-so-slightly,  _ to rest against his sternum instead. 

“If you are truly a comrade, why not enter the city without deceit?” the woman demanded, hands deft on the handle of her sword. 

“I don’t do cars.” Stephen clasped his hands behind his back. 

“You’re disrespe—”

An excited call drowned the woman out, and both she and Stephen turned to glance in its direction. Between the legs of the growing crowd, a young teen was running toward them.

As the kid burst through into the clearing before them, quickly followed by another, sword-woman turned slightly to stare at him. Stephen, raising an eyebrow, lifted his index finger and pointedly pushed the sword aside. 

“It’s the Midgardian wizard!” the first boy exclaimed, sounding excited. “See, Ingun, didn’t I tell you that story was true?”

Stephen, sword-woman, and various members of their group of onlookers stared at the teenager in shock. Heedless of the weapons, the boy covered the final feet and bowed in greeting. “It is good to meet you, wizard of infinite beer.”

_ Oh. Right. _

“His Majesty told me of you five years ago,” continued the kid. He gave Stephen a quick once over, eyes lighting up even more at the Cloak’s curious bristle. 

“Iuli.” Sword-woman hissed. “What are you doing here? How do you know this invader?”  
“Invader? Not he,” said the boy—Iuli—chuckling a bit. “This is the Midgardian magic master that directed our Princes to Odin in their Quest of Ragnarok!”

A murmur of realization and recognition went through the crowd, and sword-woman’s weapon dropped. 

“Oh,” said someone in the crowd, sounding sheepish.  
_“Thank you,_ ” Stephen grumbled, straightening his robes. He should probably just start introducing himself as ‘Infinity Beer Wizard’ at this point. 

“Why do you come?” Iuli wondered.

Stephen nodded to him. “I require the assistance of your king.”

“Oh!” The boy’s excitement turned to a slight hesitance. “Is something not right?”

_ Nothing’s been right for five years, little boy. _

“Something is to be set right,” Stephen said. “But I can’t do it on my own.”

“I’ll take you to Her Majesty,” Iuli said. 

A thousand protests rose from the street, but the teen was unphased. “This Midgardian is the only reason any of us still live! The least we can do is give him audience!”

To Stephen’s surprise, no one disagreed, though there was a smattering of irritated grumbling. Iuli took the Cloak’s corner and began to lead Stephen forward, not waiting for permission. Sword-lady followed, likely as a precaution, but no one stopped them as they advanced down the street.

_ Well then.  _ Stephen nodded. 

After getting past the locals, it was surprisingly easy to gain audience with the king. Mostly because she was in the central square of town, skinning a fish and hustling a dealer over the price of a particularly deadly knife. 

“Your Majesty!” Iuli called, echoed by the nameless sword-lady. 

Valkyrie looked up, her gaze snagging immediately on Stephen. He looked out of place anywhere, but in the fishing town it was especially obvious. 

“Hey,” she replied. Kicking her legs beneath her, she stood and tucked her skinning knife into a sheath at her side. “What mischief have you caused this time?”  
“This wizard wanted to see you,” said sword-lady. 

Valkyrie looked at her. “I could not have been more clearly speaking to Iuli.”

Sword-lady choked, and the king held her gaze for a moment before grinning like a madwoman and beckoning them closer. “I’m kidding. What do you want?”

That was directed at Stephen, who cleared his throat. “Your help.”

“With what?”

“Skinning a sea-imp,” Stephen deadpanned. “Saving the universe, obviously.”

“Thought we already did that.” The king trailed her finger along the spine of the half-gutted fish. 

“This is the followup paperwork,” Stephen said. 

“Well, don’t be vague, tell me who I need to kill.”

Stephen shook his head. “No one, sorry to disappoint. I simply need a look inside the ship that carried you here from Asgard.”

Valkyrie stiffened. “Why.”

“So I can portal into it from a different realm back in 2018 in order to bandage our fraying timeline,” Stephen replied bluntly. “So I can speak to a certain Prince before he meets his end.”

The king’s face flickered. “Loki?” she said, voice soft with surprise and what might have been fondness.

“Yes.”

Valkyrie eyed him, humming slightly. “Why should I trust you.”

“Your former king says you should re-establish the Valkyrie force,” Stephen recited from photographic memory of the email Thor’d sent not hours before. “Because he loves women. Sometimes a bit too much.”

The king huffed a laugh and rolled her eyes. “Of course he did. Fine, I’ll help you.” She lifted her fish, and the light reflected off its silver scales into Stephen’s eyes. 

“Great.”

The king beckoned, and Stephen trotted over to her, leaving Iuli and the sword-woman behind. “We didn’t come here on the ship,” Valkyrie explained, ducking into a brightly-painted street. “Half of our people escaped with me on what remained of the ship’s pods.”

“Ah,” Stephen said. That made sense.

“We’ve repurposed most of them for their resources, but one remains in the case space travel is necessary in the future. I don’t know where it was situated on the original ship; you’re going to need time to figure that out.”

Stephen followed her around yet another pink and green building. “You’re taking this all rather well.”

“What, time-travel back to the worst moment of my life and a portal into my dying people’s spaceship?” The king hummed. “I suppose I am.”

She didn’t say anything more on the matter.

  
  


The location Stephen chose was special only because it was the first abandoned landscape that popped into his head. He wasn’t even sure where the cornfield and empty upstate highway really were. It seemed Midwestern, but the area around him could be on a different continent for all he knew. 

Perhaps he’d been to this little field as a child. Perhaps he’d glimpsed it in a textbook or on the internet, and could quantify the energies because the photo had been so clear. It didn’t matter, though. All that mattered was its emptiness.

Even with the Stone, time-travel was no simple or easy feat. Popping into 2018 opened up a myriad of dangers, for both himself and the timeline, so solitude upon arrival was Stephen’s best option of alleviating those dangers. He couldn’t risk bumping into his 2018 self or Wong, couldn’t risk a civilian seeing his arrival and phoning an authority. 

So this sun-bleached, winter-cracked field was where he’d perform his spell. The Time Stone would only take him back, not transplant him in location, so Stephen would portal into space as soon as 2018 fizzled into existence around him.

Or he fizzled into existence within it. One of those. You could never tell with the Time Stone.

“Do you want a tree or something?” he asked the Cloak as he stepped out of his portal.

The Cloak twitched in question, and Stephen realized he likely hadn’t filled it in completely.

“I’m leaving you here in 2024.” He touched the Cloak’s clasps, holding them in place so he could slip out of it.

It slapped him, hard. 

“Ow! Wait, let me explain, will you?” 

The Cloak was glowering, its collars folded in on themselves as it practically secreted  _ ‘what the fuck?’  _ Stephen tried to stroke it in comforting apology, but it shoved his hands away and waited. 

“I’m going to lose the Time Stone,” Stephen said. He brushed his fingers across the knuckles of his other hand in order to keep them from gripping the makeshift Eye around his neck. In his fist, a piece of paper crinkled. 

 “If this works, Loki will carve himself and the Stone a daughter universe sprouting from a point in our own,” Stephen’s words were almost whipped away by the late February wind. “That universe will have seven Stones, but one of them belongs in this universe; it’s energy signature draws from and releases into our reality.”

A buffeting gust had the Cloak billowing and the dried cornstalks clattering together. Stephen shivered and kept talking.

“So our Time Stone will force Loki’s universe into partiality and give it a shared astral plane with our world. Which makes it possible for the universes to be merged.”

The Cloak nodded. It’s corners were crossed, waiting for him to get to the point.

“But Loki will only be able to accomplish his task if I give him something to work with. I have a list—” he held it up for a moment, making sure to keep a tight hold— “and in order for our good God of Mischief to split the timeline in the first place, he’ll need the Stone.” 

Glancing down at the makeshift amulet hanging against his sternum, Stephen rubbed a hand over his face. 

“So I’ll give it to him. In 2018.”

In an instant, the Cloak had wrapped a corner around his wrist. The movement was almost desperate.

“I won’t be trapped there,” Stephen clarified hastily. “Loki can use the Stone to send me back into the timestream. But without welding it myself… getting back here in the same hour—hell, the same  _ week— _ is going to be difficult.”

The Cloak tightened its grip. 

Stephen, smiling sadly, covered its corner with his shaking hand. “I’ve been within the timestream before. I can find my way back, but not through my own life. I’ll need something else.”

The Cloak gestured to itself.

“Yeah,” Stephen said. “You.”

It stared at him in that way it did. Stephen’s mind slipped dangerously toward the worst-case-scenario, falling for eternity within the Tapestry. 

The Cloak would wait for him, he knew. Until this road was nothing but rubble, until this field had become a metropolis, until the life of Earth was over, and even then. It would wait.

“Do you want a tree or something?” Stephen asked again.

By way of response, the Cloak flew forward and wrapped itself tight around him. Stephen returned its awkward embrace with his breath catching in his throat.

“I’ll be back,” Stephen promised, stepping away. “I’ll be back. And then, and then they’ll all be back.”

The Cloak saluted, but Stephen could see its collars drooping. 

 He offered it a smile, wrapping a scarred fist around the amulet at his throat. Gripping the wire and pulling with all his insignificant strength, he opened the Stone to Earth’s air. It’s energy coiled around Stephen’s Mystic perception, eager and demanding and ready. 

Stephen wrapped the power around his wrist. He took a deep breath and glanced up at the Cloak, watching the emerald reflection off the bronze-tinted clasps.

“I’ll be back before you know I’m gone,” Stephen murmured.

Then he closed his eyes and dropped out of existence.

  
  
  
  



	39. Benefit of the Doubt

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

When Peter tucked the phone into the pocket of his ruby hoodie, the silence of the warehouse descended with almost aggressive pressure. The call was still open, but Mr. Stark’s voice was nothing but a hum of background noise without the speakerphone of the device. He spoke to FRIDAY, and eventually, Peter assumed, to Loki.

Upside-down and dropping slowly through the stories of the industrial park, Peter tried to contain his deja-vu. His hands were shaking, just slightly. He carefully dropped onto the floor of the basement, seeing the outline of Toomes against the dim light filtering from the lampshade suspended above him.

The desk was glaringly out of place in this gloomy industrial room. There were empty storage containers against the walls, flickering strips of incandescent lights on the roof, caution-yellow guardrails on rickety stainless-steel staircases. But there, in the center of the empty area, was a cozy desk and wheeling chair, lamp and computer, all set up for this man’s criminal business. 

“Hey!” Peter called, letting his voice carry. He severed the connection to the webbing at his wrist. “Surprised?”

Toomes turned, silver and black in the moonlight. “Oh hey Pete.” Echoing eerily, his voice was unnervingly casual. “I didn’t hear you come in.”

He didn’t sound surprised, he didn’t sound threatened, not even as Peter stepped into the light. Leaning against the table behind him, Toomes smirked. 

Peter thought of the man across the phone line, facing a god outside the park’s roof. Thought of the man who’d trusted him with this mission, given him one last chance despite everything. Picturing Iron Man in the back of his mind, Peter rolled his shoulders back and stalked forward. 

_ Confident. Composed.  _ “It’s over,” he called. “I’ve got you.”

Toomes was unperturbed. “You know, I gotta tell you, Pete, I really, really admire your grit. I see why Liz likes you. I do. When you first came to the house, I wasn’t sure. I thought, ‘Really?’ But I get it now.”

“How could you do this to her?” Peter demanded, ignoring the little voice that asked  _ ‘and what are you doing to her?’ _

“To her?” Toomes’ voice hardened with conviction, almost hissing as he stood firmly on his feet. Peter aimed his web-shooter. Toomes continued, “I’m not doing anything to her, Pete. I’m doing this _ for _ her.”

“Uh-huh, yeah,” Peter growled, and fired. 

His splatter of webbing stuck Toomes’ hand to the desk. He regarded it with a sigh, still not seeming very concerned. 

Peter’s spider-sense started prickling. 

“Peter, you’re young. You don’t understand how the world works. I was going to forgive you, you know, give you the benefit of the doubt.”

Keeping his face hard beneath the mask, Peter moved forward with calm, easy steps. “Forgive  _ me?”  _ he scoffed. 

Toomes nodded, his expression twisting. “For killing four men and injuring nine more.”

Peter’s composure stumbled.

Like the vulture he was, Toomes’ seized upon the weakness before Peter could hide it. “They’re still in critical condition, you know,” he growled. His hand was picking at the webbing that trapped him. “And their families? They’re only scraping by the treatment fees because of the business  _ I‘ve  _ provided. And one family can’t pay—a wife and two kids going bankrupt to keep their daddy alive.”

Peter smelled smoke. He shook his head, shoving the scent from his senses. 

“All I’ve done is sell a few guns,” Toomes said, leaning toward Peter in the shadows. “I’ve sent underground Brooklyn kids to college, sent my daughter to the engineering school she deserves. I’ve lifted men out of poverty. What have  _ you  _ done?”

Unbidden, Peter’s own voice filtered through his mind. 

_ ‘I helped this lost old Dominican Lady. I just feel like I could be doing more, y’know?’ _

He stayed silent.

“You’re the criminal, Spider-Man, not me.”

“I’m not!” The words leapt out before he could contain them, and they were sharp and high. Childish. 

Calmer, Peter repeated, “I’m not.”

_ Four dead. Nine injured. _

Toomes pulled on the webbing against him. His face was twisted, spiteful and almost eager. “Who are you then? Huh, Peter? Who are you?”

“I’m—”

Peter trailed off. He had no answer to that.

“You’re a murderer.” 

Toomes’ voice was sure, confident, like his claim was so obvious its truth was doubtless. And Peter flinched, flinched like a knife had grazed his skin, his throat. 

“I did—” Peter took a breath. “Selling weapons to criminals is wrong. I might not know much, but I do know that.”

“How do you think your buddy Stark paid for that tower? Or any of his little toys?” Toomes hissed. “Those people, Pete, those people up there, the rich and the powerful, they do whatever they want. Guys like us, like you and me, they don’t care about us. We build their roads and we fight all their wars and everything, but they don’t care—” 

_ ‘What if you had died, because I didn’t fight hard enough to get you to leave?’ _

“You’re wrong,” Peter interrupted, taking a step forward. 

_ ‘I wanted you to be better.’ _

“You’re wrong.”

“Maybe I am,” Toomes said. “But it won’t matter to you much longer.”

With a roar, something burst to life above Peter. He ducked on instinct, the cell-phone clattering uselessly out of his pocket, as the wing-suit swooped into the industrial dome. Peter saw Toomes moving. He didn’t spare him a glance, however, to focused on avoiding the swooping suit as it smashed into the walls around him.

He dove aside, feeling the rush of air from the suit’s turbines ruffle the strings of his hoodie. Webbing pulled him out of its range, and the wings shredded another pillar. Peter leapt to his feet. 

“I’m sorry Peter,” Toomes called as Peter somersaulted under another attack. 

“What are you talking about?” Peter panted. “That thing hasn’t even touched me yet!”

Toomes shrugged, and Peter saw a knife in his hand. He’d cut himself free of the webbing in the chaos, and Peter drew a sharp breath. “True,” he said, and he didn’t sound worried, didn’t even sound ruffled  _ why why why not—  _

“Then again,” Toomes continued, “it wasn’t really trying to.”

Peter froze.

Everything else did, too.

And then there came a sound like a crackling tin-can, but louder than thunder, than gunshots, than anything Peter’d heard before, and Peter was starting to run, to raise his wrists in the very same moment the building teetered like it Ned’s pencil when he stuck it behind his ear, in the very same moment the final supports for thousands of tons of steel and plastic and wood crumbled into nothingness, and those thousands of tons of steel and plastic and wood crumbled too, crumbled down, crumbled onto Peter Benjamin Parker, who couldn’t think of anything but Ned’s pencil, swaying, swaying, swaying.

Falling. 

_ Plink.  _

Peter screamed, and all that came out was dust. 

* * *

 

The swaying cheat grass melted beneath Tony’s repulsors when he slammed to a stop against the ground of the field. He lifted a palm, ready to fire at a hairsbreadth notice, but nothing rose above the swaying grasses for a long moment. 

Then, slowly, as though making sure Tony could see every whisper of movement, a figure fizzled into existence a few yards away.

“Don’t shoot,” Loki of Asgard called, his hands raised above his head.

Tony didn’t lower his hand, didn’t even blink. He wasn’t sure what he’d see in the darkness behind his eyelids if he did.

“I don’t have the boy.” Loki’s words were hasty, run together at the edges like he was nervous. Good.

“I know,” Tony said, voice grating. He jerked his head to the left. “He’s catching your minion with the wings in that building.”

“My—oh.” 

Tony’s suit whirred as he charged the repulsor, making sure Loki could see it flash from blue to a pure, sizzling white. “I should kill you now. For a thousand different reasons.”

He saw Loki tense involuntarily, and knew a quick blast would do it. Would end any plot or danger that roared in his head. 

But… but Loki still had his hands up. And those plots and dangers were in Tony’s head, not necessarily in the god’s. They were possibilities, were glimpses of the future, but Tony had signed documents that made the present just as important. The theoretical didn’t outweigh the actual. 

So Tony waited. FRIDAY was whirring at nervous speeds in his peripheral, pulling up data useful and random, and he slowed his breathing in a hope to reassure her. “Why did you tell me you had him?” he asked, low and purposeful.

Loki didn’t move—smart. “I needed to speak to you, man of iron.”

“I’m available for public correspondence by appointment at the Compound on Thursdays and Saturdays,” Tony said, voice aggressively flippant.

“And you wouldn’t have shot me, imprisoned me, or otherwise caused me inconvenient suffering on sight?” Loki asked with a sardonic sort of smirk.

“Never know,” Tony said. “I get all sorts of types in those meetings.”

Loki laughed, but it was flat and awkward in the silent night air. “I’m sure.”

Tony was tense within his suit, fingers itching as the weight of the extended gauntlet rested on them. “I came alone,” he said. “If you move—”

“Yes, yes, I understand how dangerous you are and the position I’m in, as good as dead, etcetera etcetera etcetera. But I mean you no harm.”

Tony scoffed. “All the fire and death might have confused me about that, King and I.”

Loki ignored the name. He looked as though he meant to move, then thought better of it and rocked back onto his heels. “What happened in the warehouse was not my intention,” Loki said carefully.

“Oh?” Tony, needing to move so much it hurt, began to circle the frozen god. “And what, pray tell,  _ was  _ your intention?”

Loki took a deep breath, craning his head to try and keep Tony in his vision for as long as possible. Tony saw his sharp, pale profile by the light of his repulsor and arc reactor. 

He didn’t know what, exactly, he expected Loki to say, but what came hesitantly out of the god’s mouth was not it.

“I needed to get you and Spider-Man to fight together,” Loki said quietly. “We needed you to listen, but we knew you wouldn’t as things are.”

Tony had stiffened, and FRIDAY was scanning the area around them. “‘We?’”

Loki nodded, closing his eyes as though preparing. “Peter and I. We’ve been… working together, for weeks now.”

Tony stared at him.

Then he barked a harsh laugh. “That, Liesmith, Silvertongue, Lord of Trickery, is the biggest piece of bullshit I’ve heard since that letter of Rogers.”

“Precisely,” Loki exclaimed. “You would never believe the story of ours, thinking it a falsehood of my devising.”

“And this isn’t?”

“It is not.” The god’s arms were trembling above his head now, and Tony figured they must be quite sore. “The man of spiders has been my ally, at least until what you did in the warehouse.”

Tony hissed. “What  _ I  _ did? Last I checked, you were—”

“Taking his suit?” Loki interrupted, not even flinching as Tony’s repulsor whirred in response. “Did you not realize what that would do to him? Your dismissal, when he’d made the worst mistake of his life moments before, when he’d killed good people for the first time? When all he needed was a reassurance that he’s still worth something?”

“Of course he his!” Tony snarled. “He’s worth more than any of us!”

“Then maybe you should think about  _ saying it every once in a while!”  _ Loki’s gaze was blazing with fury, and Tony abruptly remembered who he was speaking to.

“I won’t be goaded by you,” Tony said, forcing his voice to be even. “Just tell me what you want.”

“I am not—” Loki cut himself off, dropping his raised arms onto his head. “I want your help. Saving the world.”

Tony laughed again, short and clipped and angry.  _ “You?”  _

“Yes me!” There was something in Loki’s eyes as they snapped to Tony’s, something tired and empty and hated. “I’m from the future, from a different dimension, and I was sent here against my will to try and prevent a cataclysm.”

Tony raised an eyebrow, nothing changing outwardly. 

Loki sighed. “You won’t believe it from me,” he said. “But you would from someone trusted. You’d believe anything if it was from someone trusted—Thor always said that was what he loved about you.”

Surprise had Tony inhaling sharply before he could stop himself. Thor… where was he? Traveling the realms, another lost friend, gone, though not in the way all the rest were.

“I don’t trust anyone,” Tony said quietly.

“So I had to make it so. I had to make you trust the kid.” Loki was speaking quickly. “And then he would tell you. And you’d believe enough to give me a chance, to give the world a chance.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, though he knew it couldn’t be seen through the helmet. “Plotting? Killing? Deceiving? That’s not the way to gain anyone’s trust,  _ especially not mine. _ All you’ve done is lie, and you might still be lying.”

“I know we… approached the situation wrong. Dramatically wrong. I’m not very good at understanding how people… why they care, what they do because of it.”

Tony scoffed. 

Loki ignored him. “So here we are.”

“What about the weapons dealers?” Tony said, rolling his extended shoulder—which was beginning to remind him that it bore a heavy metal gauntlet.  

Loki shrugged. “Inconsequential. But they made a fine excuse for your communication with the boy.”

Tony could only shake his head. “I don’t understand,” he growled. “What are you trying to do, Loki? What does all this  _ gain  _ you? Why—just tell me whatever nefarious thing you’re planning and this would all be a great deal easier.”

Loki smiled, but it wasn’t at Tony. “Nefarious,” he mumbled. “You two really are the chip and the old block.”

“What?” Tony demanded. 

“It matters not,” Loki sighed. “Just—ask Peter. He’ll confirm that everything I’ve said is true!”

“Through mind control? Trickery?” Tony shook his head. “Peter isn’t stupid enough to believe a single word of your lies.”   

“No,” Loki agreed, to Tony’s surprise. “But he’s just empathetic enough to help an injured god, drained from time-travel and broken from events that haven’t occurred yet, even if that god is a monster.”

There was such fondness, such quiet conviction in those words that whatever irate comment Tony had building in his throat stuck against the back of his teeth. 

Loki looked at him, his mouth quirking into a weary smile. “You can do whatever you want to me. Tie me up, paralyze me, anything. I’ve had worse. All I ask is that you listen.”

Tony didn’t so much as twitch.

Loki lowered his gaze, shoulders slumping. “Listen,” he murmured. “Please.”

_ Please. _

This was a trap. This had to be a trap, and Tony was walking into it again, was being played for a fool, but Loki of Asgard was begging. And he sounded shattered, utterly exhausted. 

Very slowly, Tony lowered his palm and the repulsor within.

Loki’s eyes widened.

And then, with a roar to rival the explosion of a room-sized arc reactor, the building to their left collapsed. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oops I squished him. :'D
> 
> So! As I said before, school starts again tomorrow, and I got a job. (Woot? Adulting, and things....) Things'll be slightly slower as I get used to the new semester, in all likelihood, but not by much! Maybe 3 or so days per chapter? When I get busy, I also get busier with the writing; it becomes a way to land in addition to a hobby and keeps me sane. XD
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	40. What Good is Any of It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

For a long moment, Tony couldn’t see through the dust. 

It was isolated, billowing up like a carnival tent from one of the many cavernous buildings of the park. One area, surgically chosen, precisely destroyed, heavy and inescapable. Beside it, free of it, he saw the shadow of wings, huge and menacing and unnatural. 

He didn’t see the shadow of anything else.

The panic that clutched at Tony’s chest was visceral. It was cold and it burned and it turned his esophagus inside out and sucked his rib-cage into and through his lungs. 

The dust expanded, lowering and obscuring anything and everything around it. Tony could smell it. He wondered how it would taste. 

It was an accident, Tony thought in a surge of desperate denial. A fluke. The park was so old, so abandoned, something could be wrong with the support and no one would know. And there were so many buildings. It didn’t have to be that one, it  _ hadn’t been that one— _

But the turbines of a wingsuit were whirring, and a phone call silently ticking in the corner of his visitor had ended. 

There was only space for one thought in his mind. One single word, drowning out all the others. 

_ No.  _

_ No,  _ no, NO—

“FRIDAY—” Tony couldn’t hear his own voice. He was searching the screen of his helmet for vitals, for anything— 

The only vitals he read were those of a limp spider-suit, hanging empty in the corner of a far-away workshop. 

* * *

 

Once, when Peter was nine, he’d gotten his swim-shorts caught on the support of a water slide. He’d wriggled out of them and burst—naked and panicked—to the surface of the pool not long after, but there’d been thirty seconds where he choked, submerged.

Water in your lungs felt like dread. Like something unsettling in the base of your stomach, heavy and dragging on everything inside you. It burned in your throat as you tried to expel it, only to suck down more.

Dust in your lungs was not like that.

Dust was something else. Dust itched. Dust coated everything it touched, bitter and thick against Peter’s larynx, behind his tongue, in his ears. He was breathing it, destroying himself as he tried to respirate it.

He was drowning in a pool of dust and rock.

He was buried in a grave of steel and silver. 

_ Murderer. _

Maybe he deserved it. 

* * *

 

Loki’s confidence shattered. 

And so did his anger, his fear, his determination. Little shards of hate and frustration and sadness dissolved like ice beneath the hot sun, leaving emptiness behind. Emptiness that tasted of dust.

_ Peter. _

Loki’s skin crawled, feathers and fur and scales boiling beneath his veins, but he was stuck frozen by the rubble falling around them. He couldn’t shift—there was nothing to shift into, nowhere to run, nothing to be done and it was too late, too late, he was falling through the Void again and this time there was no one to catch him and nothing waiting on the other side.

_ Peter. _

Magic roiled around Loki’s hands, eating away at his sleeves like an invisible splash of venom. The invisible force pulled at his cheeks, his hair, his neck. He felt nothing. 

_ Peter. _

Loki took a step forward. The scene around him was morphing, run through with wires of purple light. He tried to advance again, but his booted foot came down on a limp, cold hand, attached to the bloody form of an Asgardian. Loki’s mouth opened in a silent scream. 

_ He’s dead,  _ a voice roared in the back of his mind. Maybe it was usually a whisper, gnawing away at him, but this was a scream, a caterwaul of inescapable fact that pounded into his consciousness.  _ He’s dead, and you never told him you forgave him, you never spoke to him again, he died thinking he’d driven you away and its all over now, you’ve failed again, you’ve failed and he’s dead, the only one who ever believed you, believed  _ in  _ you, you you YOU— _

Loki convulsed, his hands flying into his hair, a half-breath shuddering through his lips. A lump formed beneath his skin, then faded away, just as the skin on his back began to stretch. That too became nothing. 

He was boiling, shifting within his skin, trapped in his body as Peter was beneath that rubble and it hurt, Odin it hurt,  _ Father help me, help  _ him—

Loki stared at the rising debris and shattered. 

* * *

 

The tears on Tony’s face burned.

He didn’t know when they had started, but they were soaking his beard now, blurring his view of the useless data on his visor. 

The dust cleared before them like the realizations in Tony’s mind, glaring and cold. The boy had promised him he’d be safe, promised, and Tony had believed him, Tony had trusted him, and now—

Now, look where they were again, but it was not Tony dead in the cold and the weight and the betrayal this time, it was Peter, and that was  _ so much worse.  _ H e should not have trusted.

No, he should have  _ kept him safe. _

The boy should be safe, Tony should have KEPT. HIM. SAFE.

Tony might have been screaming it, roaring it, sobbing it, as he stumbled backward in the grass of a field he never should have touched. He should have been with the boy. But he had not, he’d been here, he’d been listening—

Listening to the Liesmith while Peter Parker died.

Tony turned, very slowly, toward the figure beside him. Loki’s posture, his expression, the sound he was making didn’t mean a thing to Tony as lies and truth and trust and denial bled together at the seams within his mind. 

_ ‘What’s left of him beneath your precious Earth.’ _

What was left of Peter now?

With a precision that did not match his trembling form and blind vision, Tony lifted his palm toward Loki.

And fired.

* * *

 

There were noises coming out of Peter now, wrung from his lungs by the concrete pressing against them. Whines and cries, grunts that didn’t sound like him, was that his voice?

His hands scrambled at the rock around him, fingernails ripping clean of their cuticles and spraying blood across the dust-coated metal. The patterns looked floral. Peter, his senses clogged and screaming at the pain, the noise, the dark, ripped at the mask on his face. Blood tracked down his cheeks as he cast it desperately to the ground before him. 

He was mumbling, words that didn’t mean anything in a tone of utter terror. They could have been screams for all the emotion they held within, but Peter couldn’t draw enough breath to cry out. 

He didn’t want to die here. He didn’t—he didn’t want to die at all, he didn’t want to go, not to dust,  _ not to dust.  _

Peter braced his hands beneath him and pushed, rubble digging into his shredded fingers. They slipped off the concrete with a stinging agony. He struggled like a netted fish, writhing in what little space he had, but it only drove pain into his chest and fear into his heart.

He started screaming then. 

* * *

 

The blast crackled through Loki’s form like lightning through rusting sewer pipes. He cried out, losing his balance, not even bothering to extend his hands to catch himself. Another blast followed, missing him by a hair's breadth.

Loki didn’t notice. He didn’t notice, didn’t feel anything, not with the voice still pounding in his head, not with the dust still churning before them, not with Peter… not with Peter…

As the low voltage of Iron Man’s not yet fully charged blast rushed through him, Loki’s form shattered like the rest of him.

A thousand textures and creatures and skins bubbled up around him, folding over his limbs, swallowing his head. They merged together into an armoured surface of onyx carapace as Loki hit the ground. He writhed, the cheat grass flattening beneath his elongating body, ripped beneath his fingers as they merged into something razor-sharp and wickedly serrated. His back arched. The skin peeled like a sail, snapping away from his form and unfurling into the cold, cold air.

Loki’s cry turned to a roar.

* * *

 

“Please, somebody! I’m down here,  _ I’m stuck, _ I can’t move! I can’t move,  _ PLEASE!” _

* * *

 

When the creature rose before him like the inky blackness of empty space, Tony’s eyes widened. 

It was surprise, adrenaline, that sent him rolling as the first swipe nearly removed his entire shoulder from his torso. Not fear. Tony didn’t have any room left for fear. It had all been sucked away, devoured by the hole in the crust of the very Earth just yards away.

Tony leapt to his feet, kicking his repulsors into action and lifting from the now-burnt grass. The creature before him—Loki—whipped an enormous, horned head in his direction. Glinting eyes, slitted through with white pupils, locked onto Tony.

Loki opened a maw the size of Tony’s torso, teeth glinting in the moonlight around them. His tongue curled against the two fangs dropping over his bottom lip. 

Tony hadn’t known they had dragons in Asgard. 

* * *

 

Peter screamed until his throat was raw and he tasted blood, but no one heard. No one came.

The tears on his face tracked through the filth, and when they reached his mouth they tasted more of copper than salt. He strained his neck, his shoulders, his arms, trying to see the light or the exit or  _ something,  _ but the weight on his back kept him helpless.

Exhausted, Peter let his head drop, his fingers trailing into the water pooling from the broken pipes around him. His mask was just barely visible beneath the surface, floating forlornly in the muck. Blood dripped off his fingers. It swirled like food coloring when it touched the water, and Peter found himself captivated.

Something was whispering at him, reminding him, and he couldn’t… he couldn’t hear… 

_ You’re nothing… _

Kid. Murderer. Useless, ignorant, inconsequential, unimportant. 

_ You’re nothing… _

The mask glinted in the water, awkward and makeshift and ragged.

_ You’re nothing… _

He’d worn that mask for six months. Learned in it, fought in it, grew in it. He’d been wearing it when he saved a dozen people within an out-of-control bus. He’d been wearing it when he did his first backflip from twenty stories up. 

He could have done all those things without it.

_ If you’re nothing…  _

In the elevator of the Washington Monument, Peter’d almost died to save a group of high-school kids. There’d been no mask then. He’d just been an ordinary hero.

_ If you’re nothing without this suit, then you shouldn’t have it.  _

Peter braced his hands beneath him and  _ pushed. _

* * *

 

Loki wasn’t sure when he started feeling again.

It came in stages as he roared, swatting at the man-shaped pest that buzzed around his towering body, barely the size of his head. He could feel his wings beating with vicious fury behind him, feel the air that whipped around his elegant neck, feel the precision of the flick of his plated tail. 

He could feel the grief that thrummed like a heartbeat in his blood. 

Some part of him, the part of him that could still think, could still function through the screaming inside his head, was trying to hold him back. It pleaded for him not to lose control. It kept crying something, some name, some claim as to his identity,  _ remember this isn’t who you are, not anymore, you aren’t a monster, this isn’t  _ you—

But the only one who’d ever believed that was lying dead beneath the rubble. 

Loki locked his gaze onto Tony Stark and began to fight. 

* * *

 

“Come on, come on Peter, Spider-Man, come  _ on Spider-Man—” _

* * *

 

It was with a tangible  _ snap  _ that Loki turned bloodthirsty. 

Tony’d felt that snap before, so many times as he fought, in so many races as they invaded, and it shoved him into true, life threatening danger with almost nauseating speed. 

Tony didn’t care. He couldn’t care.

_ ‘I’ll leave what’s left of him beneath your precious Earth.’ _

He didn’t care what was a lie anymore, didn’t care who he should trust. He didn’t care that his legacy was breaking, that his memory was souring, because _what did that matter anyway,_ what did any of it matter?  
Truth, life, trust, safety, future. 

What good was any of it, if he couldn’t protect the ones he loved?

Tony was yelling over the sound of FRIDAY’s voice, the sound of Loki’s roar. He dived, his out-of-date suit sparking, sending a beam of energy into the creature’s neck. 

The dragon flinched, thundering an angry defiance, but it did not slow. Wings raised, fangs bared, it was so close Tony could smell the fire in its throat. 

Tony began to call power to his arc reactor. It crackled, and he pushed away the memories that tried to rise to the surface—they didn’t matter, nothing mattered. 

Loki beat his great wings, and Tony found himself unbalanced in the air. It moved like wind, but not at all, unable to be tracked and stabilized within and suddenly Tony was upside-down, was flying  _ toward  _ Loki and not away—

A jaw closed around him with the power of an industrial piston. Tony went to fire the rockets behind his shoulder blades as the pressure began to crack through the metal on his hip and shoulder and that was impossible, that shouldn’t be possible,  _ no no no no no— _

The Mark 46 didn’t have shoulder-mounted flares, Tony remembered vaguely, just as Loki’s teeth shattered through the steel and buried themselves in his flesh. 

* * *

 

With slow, coughing movements, the rubble began to shift.

_ “Come on, Spider-Man!” _

* * *

 

Tony’d learned once that bone transmitted sound better than air. 

He hadn’t believed it, five years old and glaring at a museum sign. But he’d sighed and done as the words had instructed, sliding a straw onto the little metal bar and biting down as he plugged his ears.

The music that had exploded into his mind had made him gasp in wonder.

But this was not music. And though it exploded, it was not wondrous.

Tony heard the crack of his hip bone fracturing, the grind of Loki’s fang against his scapula. He heard his tendons stretching, snapping like rubber-bands.

And it hurt.

A breathless scream escaped Tony’s throat as Loki bit down harder, shards of Tony’s broken armor digging into both of them. Loki snarled, lowering his head, and  _ shook  _ like a wolf with a rabbit in his teeth.

Tony screamed again.

He crumpled with barely the strength to slow his fall with a repulsor as Loki dropped him. His suit was wet with blood; he could feel it down his legs, sparking against the shredded wires. FRIDAY was powering it down, doing all she could to protect him—Tony could hear her fearful voice in his ears but couldn’t recognize what she said. 

He blinked, rolling onto his back. Loki was standing above him, pupils narrow, green eyes flashing.  _ He looks evil with that blood on his teeth,  _ Tony thought distantly.  _ Like a fantasy character. _

His suit was pulling away from him, now that it was compromised. Good—if the central wire was severed, the arc reactor was destabilizing and Tony being in the suit when that happened? Not good. 

Not that it mattered. 

Tony forced his hands to move, pulling himself out of the shattered suit, trailing dark fluid onto the metal and grass. It was sticky. Good thing this was his workshop shirt—there was grease on it anyway. 

There was a dragon rearing above him, claws the color of midnight.

Right. Loki, Prince of Asgard. Tony was going to die, wasn’t he?

Tony didn’t think he had the capability to care anymore. He just hoped someone would take care of the bots.

* * *

 

Was that a  _ dragon? _

Oh. 

_ Oh shit. _

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Three things:   
> 1) I really like parallels in case you haven't noticed.  
> 2) You can't have expected me to write a shapeshifter and turn them into a dragon at some point. Seriously, I don't have THAT much self control.  
> 3) Maybe try not to hate me.


	41. The Stubborn Bastard

 

 **Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

When the chain of moon-white thread arched through the air before them, Tony thought it looked like water. A little stream of it, splattering against the teeth of the creature lunging for him. Some intrinsic instinct had Tony lifting a hand to try and touch it.

Loki reared in surprise, and the thread seemed to congeal, to harden into something solid and supporting, light and strong. Like spider-silk.

There was a figure on the end of the strand. Swinging like some twisted Tarzan retelling, his red-stained hands pulled him up the webbing to keep him off the ground. He shed dust in a grey, coughing trail. Landing before the dragon with a wordless yell, the figure slipped in Tony’s blood but never lost his inhuman balance.

When he looked at the grass and the empty suit in horror, Tony saw his face.

And stared.

Peter Parker, dusty and snotty and tear-stained, stared back.

“Mr. Stark—” the boy began, eyes flickering up and down Tony’s form. The words choked into nothing.

A deafening roar had them both flinching, and Tony tried to speak, tried to call out as Peter turned toward the monster behind him. But all that came to his lips was blood, blood and burning terror as the bared fangs of Loki swept toward the boy. Fangs that had torn through metal like it was aluminum, and Peter was in nothing but dusty sweat-pants, and he was _going to die again—_

Peter threw his hands up, and for one delirious moment, Tony thought he looked like Atlas, ready to brace the entire world on his shoulders.

He was just a kid.

And he did not flee, did not so much as flinch at the beast bearing down on him. 

When Loki’s teeth were inches from Peter’s hands, when saliva was joining the blood and tears on the boy’s face, Tony found his voice.

“Kid,” he croaked, _“Peter!”_

Peter did not hear him.

Tony curled around his injured side unconsciously, unable to force any more words through the panic and the pain, unable to order the boy to run, to go, _don’t die, please, just go, I’m not worth it._

Tony reached for something, anything, to use as a weapon. Something to protect the boy before him, to save him.

Peter spoke instead. “Mr. Loki!” 

His voice was young and loud and horrified, bouncing into the dragon’s mind. Tony saw its eyes dilate.

And then, like someone had flipped a switch, it froze. 

They stood there, paralyzed, for a long time. Peter with his hands out, Loki with his muzzle almost brushing them. 

With a low, low voice, like the ocean incarnate, the dragon spoke. “Peter?”

Peter nodded. “What the hell have you done?”  
“You’re alive?” Loki said with hesitant, joyous disbelief, echoing Tony’s own thoughts. “I thought—I thought—”

“Yes I’m alive you idiot, what the _fuck have you done?”_

Tony blinked.

Peter craned behind himself, wide eyes meeting Tony’s through the blades of blood-soaked grass in Tony’s horizontal vision.

“I…” the dragon looked to Tony, and seemed to see him for the first time.

Pungent horror broke through the beast’s expression, turning it strangely and achingly human. 

“I—I didn’t—”

Peter didn’t so much as look at Loki to acknowledge the words. 

Instead, he was flying across the field, crashing to his knees beside Tony’s curled form, and Tony could see the tears gathering in his already red eyes and no, the boy had cried enough, and didn’t he understand? Peter was alive and everything was fine again, as fine as it could be, what with him knowing Loki and maybe the god’s insane story not being a lie and the Accords and all the money Tony’d have to pay to fix that building and cover the signs of a dragon in this field and—

A particularly violent curl of agony lanced through Tony, and he gagged.

And puncture in his shoulder. That too. 

“Shit shit shit shit shit,” Peter panted, his hands hovering awkwardly over Tony. “I don’t know what to do, tell me what to do, I don’t—”

“M’fine,” Tony slurred. “Thought you were dead. But y’not.”

“You’re an idiot too—takes more than a collapsing building to kill Spider-Man.” Though his words were light, there was terror alight in every muscle of his body.

“Loki… tellin’ the truth?”

“Yeah,” Peter said on the tail end of a breath. “It’s all true, I know it sounds impossible but we needed you—I _need_ you so stop all this dying _right now,_ okay, just _stop—”_

Tony laughed, but stopped after a single exhale as it only tasted of blood. “I’m not dying, kid,” he managed. “Takes more… than a dragon-god to kill… Iron Man.”

The dragon god in question had whipped its head sideways, tracking something in the distance, and Tony frowned. Peter followed his gaze, wiping sweat off his forehead but only succeeding in smearing blood where it had been.    

Loki glanced at Peter and Tony, jerking his head at the horizon. Tony couldn’t seem to get his neck to move enough to see what he was indicating, but Peter could.

“Right,” the boy breathed. “I forgot about him.”

“Vulture… guy?” The last word broke into an agonized gasp, and Peter winced like the pain was his own.

“Don’t talk,” he shushed, then called to Loki, “hey, can you…”

The dragon nodded. “Leave it to me.” With an elegant, powerful movement, he leapt into the sky. His wings caught the moonlight, flashing like polished stones. 

He was quite pretty, Tony thought through the fuzziness descending over his mind. When he wasn’t trying to rip you to ribbons, that was. 

“Won’t he… kill…” Tony began. 

“I thought I told you not to talk!” Peter snapped. “And no, he won’t, I made him promise…”

His eyes flickered down to the wound and its leaking gore, and Tony hissed to bring his attention back to his face. “Suit’s… shut down. Nobody knows I’m—” he broke into a groan. Breathing was getting rather difficult. “FRIDAY would’ve ‘lerted the Compound, Infirmary. Get yourself checked up, too.”

“You have to stay awake,” Peter hissed, his hands fluttering like caged birds. Tony wanted to take them, to still them, reassure the boy, but he couldn’t make his arms move. 

“I am,” Tony said, though he was really, very achingly tired. 

It hurt. A lot. And there was blood and fluid in places it shouldn’t be, numbness of areas that wasn’t natural, pain that shouldn’t be possible, what the _fuck_ universe, what was this, could you just _not_ because Tony hurt and he didn’t like it, couldn’t you just _stop—_

Peter stuttered, “It’ll take—I don’t have—will we make it in time?”

Tony’s tunneling vision spotted enormous wings furling behind Peter, saw the glint of a limp wingsuit in his claws. He offered a smile over bloody teeth.

“If your d’gon’s that efficient, I dares’y you will.”

And with that, Tony lost consciousness.

* * *

 

A cry ripped its way through Peter’s throat as Stark’s eyes flickered shut. 

“Hey, _hey!”_ Peter hissed. “Mr. Stark, the eyes thing is non-negotiable— _Mr. Stark!”_

The man didn’t react, didn’t so much as twitch. Peter felt like he was choking on dust again. 

He slapped his fingers against Stark’s cheek, neck, collarbone, smearing red across anywhere he touched. There was blood all over his hands, all down his front, and he didn’t know whose it was anymore. 

There was blood in the grass, too, glistening sickeningly in the moonlight. Stark’s shirt was soaked with it, clinging to his surprisingly gaunt form. The letters of the logo that stretched across his front, once white, were now a rusty, splotched brown. The blood Stark had lost was pooling against Peter’s pant legs. He was kneeling in it. 

“Please wake up,” Peter choked. 

There were three wounds, and the one in the shoulder obviously the worst. Wreathed in bruising gore, it leaked rivulets of liquid down Stark’s arm to drip off his fingers, nearly black in the light. Peter, swallowing, ripped a long strip from his filthy hoodie and pressed it to the wound, another wrapping around the man’s neck to hold it in place.

Stark didn’t react. 

“Mr. Stark!” Peter said again. And again. He kept calling the man’s name, his voice creeping up in pitch and volume, his panic and emotional whiplash drawing exhaustion through his bones. 

It felt so familiar. So, so familiar and Peter didn’t know why, didn’t know how it could hurt so badly, didn’t know how he could _know_ this, know this by the name of Stark _._ He couldn’t lose him here, too. 

And then, behind him, a familiar voice interrupted. 

“Get on,” Loki said, the footsteps of his huge form vibrating through Peter. “I’ll take you, somewhere, anywhere, we’ll fix this.”

Peter looked up at his friend, embarrassed to find tears welling in his eyes again.  

“He’s… he’s hurt bad, I don’t—I don’t know—”

Even in such an inhuman face, Loki’s grief, guilt, sorrow was heart-wrenchingly obvious. “Five minutes. Less. Upon my wings, we will fly.”

Peter looked at the curled form before him, blinking his vision clear. Stark looked so small, nothing at all like the hero Peter remembered seeing, nothing at all like the strength.

Or maybe more so. 

Peter wondered, in the back of his mind, which strength was truest. 

“Okay.” He kept his voice controlled, kept his whole form that way. He could do this. He _had_ to do this. “Move him as little as you can. Fly as _fast_ as you can.”

Standing, pants wet against his knees and thighs, Peter glanced around. “Vulture?”

Loki jerked his snout behind him. Toomes was slumped in the grass a few yards away, and Peter’s enhanced ears picked up his breathing.

Looking up at Loki, Peter took a breath. “Can you carry them both?”

Loki huffed, deep in his throat, and lowered his long, elegant neck. “I can carry all three of you.”

Peter stared.

“You want…”

Loki blinked at him, looking genuinely surprised. “What?” he said. “Have you never rode a dragon before?”

And Peter, hysterical and broken and tired as all fuck, started laughing.

  


They landed on the lawn of the Compound with impressive delicacy, Loki’s wings beating with harsh, aggressive speed to lower himself gently onto his back legs. He dropped Toomes like a sack of potatoes onto the lawn, and Peter webbed the man to the grass on the off chance he woke up anytime soon.

Peter swung his leg over Loki’s spine as his friend carefully, achingly, lowered Mr. Stark to the grass. Stark was pale, and Peter thought he could see him trembling.

 _“HELP!”_ Peter roared, wasting no time. He slid from the comfortable dip between the dragon’s shoulder blades. Loki’s scales were smooth and cool and his flight was even and wonderfully comfortable, if Peter had had any available mind space to enjoy it. 

In an instant, with a greenish mirage and a flicker of power, the dragon had disappeared, leaving Loki beneath. The god sprinted to Peter’s side as he knelt before Mr. Stark, head snapping between the unconscious figure and the doors of the Compound. 

Lights were on, silhouettes were moving, and with a _crash_ the front doors slammed open. Two figures broke into a run without pause, backlit from the white light behind the bay windows. 

Peter didn’t care to identify them. Instead, he pressed a hand to Mr. Stark’s forehead, wondering if that wetness was blood or sweat. 

He didn’t realize he’d reached up with the other hand until a hesitant, somewhat nervous grip encircled it. Loki knelt beside him, tense. Peter thought the god might be holding his breath. 

“I’m so sorry,” Loki breathed. “I…”

“Don’t,” Peter interrupted. “This wasn’t you, Mr. Loki.”

“It was.” The god’s voice was quiet, aching.

“Maybe it was,” Peter agreed sharply. “But that hardly matters now. I don’t blame you, and neither will he, so you don’t get to do it either.”

Before Loki could respond, another voice was rising over the Compound. “Pe—Spider-Man! Is that you?”

It sounded like Colonel Rhodes. Peter found the strength to look away from Mr. Stark. “Help him, _you have to help him!”_

Beside Rhodes, Peter saw Ms. Potts, moving with vulpine grace. He knew he should stand, should let them move to Stark uninhibited, but he didn’t. Irrationally, idiotically, Peter refused to leave the man’s side. 

Halfway to them, Rhodes and Potts froze. 

Peter ripped his gaze to them, a desperate, angry hiss erupting under his tongue because _what were they waiting for, there was no time, there was—_

“Peter,” Rhodes said slowly. “Don’t move.”

That’s when Peter remembered Loki, who knelt and clutched his hand close, covered in blood, face ragged with what Peter knew was exhaustion but these people would see as violence.

And there was no time, no time for any of it. 

“He’s a friend, god- _fucking-_ damn it,” Peter snarled. “I’ll explain everything, Mr. Stark will, but you _have to help him,_ NOW!”

“Is that—”

Peter saw the moment when Ms. Potts realized the limp rag of stained cloth and brown flesh was Tony Stark. It dawned in shattering horror in her expression, and her hand flew to her mouth as her steps resumed, even faster than before.

The doors to the Compound had opened again, and Peter knew help was coming, knew FRIDAY would have explained everything. Finally, he convinced himself to stand and move away from Mr. Stark.

Peter stood, hand in hand with Loki of Asgard, as a swarm of infirmary staff made their way across the lawn.

Rhodes spared him a single glance, a once-over snagging on each of the cuts on his face and hands, taking in the dust on his clothes, before he too dropped to Mr. Stark’s side.

“You idiot,” the Colonel said softly, a hand brushing the makeshift bandage on Stark’s shoulder. “Had to go alone, didn’t you?”

“Why—” Peter took a breath. “Why did he come alone?”

Beside Peter, Loki tensed. 

Rhodes’ eyes were burning when they lifted toward the god. There was pure fury there, pure hate, the force of which made Peter take a step back.

“Because I made him,” Loki answered for the colonel. “I… I told him I’d kidnapped you.”

Peter snapped his gaze to his friend. “What?”

“Pepper called me when she found the note,” Rhodes said. His tone was flat, controlled, though it still trembled with rage as his hand brushed the unconscious Stark’s chest. “I didn’t dare come after you.”

Loki winced.

The four of them stepped back as white-clad individuals reached their strange little group, flowing in organized streams around the bleeding man. Their hands gripped tools, too many of them, but Peter’s resurfacing fear was strangely eased by a single sentence drifting to his ears.

“He’s breathing. Steady heartbeat, the stubborn bastard.”

Peter smiled. 

After that, the words began to slur together in Peter’s ears. There was a rushing behind them, like wind in pine trees or water down rapids and he found himself swaying. Was the world supposed to shift like that?

“Woah there, boy of spiders,” Loki said softly, bracing a hand on Peter’s shoulder. “Get yourself checked up, too.”

“They look… really mad,” Peter mumbled. “Mr. Stark—”

“--will be fine,” Loki assured. “Both of us will be fine. It’s late, Peter. You almost died. It is alright. Someone will call your aunt, Leeds, I shall make sure of it.”

Peter hummed, unabashedly leaning against the god of mischief. The leather of his tunic was cool—filthy and slick, but cool. Peter thought he glimpsed War Machine’s conflicted gaze through the movements of the people before him, but he couldn’t be sure, everyone was just going so fast.

But they knew what they were doing. These were Avengers doctors, Mr. Stark’s doctors. They were the best of the best—only the best for Iron Man’s team. They would take care of his Stark, they would take care of Peter himself. 

And Loki… Loki promised.

They were home now. Home, and Loki wasn’t hiding, didn’t have to hide, because maybe they’d done it. All the fighting, the strategizing, the wishing, and Mr. Stark believed them. Mr. Stark would help them, would make this right.

It would be okay.

Peter’s eyes had already slipped closed. The rest of him followed. 

And sleep, for once, was hopeful. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope that was satisfying! :) One more chapter, and then Part One is done! 
> 
> ...
> 
> Part one (1). Starting to maybe get a feeling of what you're in for here? XD
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	42. Hope Again

 

**Earth-199999:** **_May 2018_ **

 

Loki, pressed against the grease-soaked wall of the crumbling Asgardian refugee ship, was trying very hard to hope.

He felt each thump of Thanos’s great fists colliding with the Hulk’s flesh as though they fell against his own body. Wincing, Loki flattened himself further, glancing around the corner into the cockpit of the ship again.

His brother was forcing shaking hands beneath him. It was slow, labored, and Loki thought he saw blood spray wetly as Thor breathed. Every part of him itched to fly forward, knives flashing, to stop Thanos and the Order that had forced his brother to such a low, for such pain in Thor’s eyes was _ wrong. _

But this was not going well. Hulk yelped, he was  _ in pain,  _ and the Tesseract was at the feet of the nose-less alien with the finger powers…

As much as it made him twitch with hate, with helplessness, Loki couldn’t afford to bring attention to himself. Not yet.

Then a voice, a familiar voice that Loki would have been perfectly happy never hearing again, made its way to his ears.

“Loki Laufeyson?"

Loki turned, hoping to whatever universe had decided to wrap his fate around its figurative finger that he was simply being disillusioned. But no, right there, in all his over-dramatic glory, was the damn Midgardian wizard, eyes exhausted, hands raised non-threateningly.

Loki found himself expressly aware that that was not his name. “It’s Odinson,” he snapped, then lowered his voice.

From what he remembered, this man was a Stonekeeper. Thor had told him, not long ago, and it hadn’t made Loki any more warm toward the narcissistic wizard. Anyone who sent him falling through an endless dimension for half an hour was not to be forgiven, protected, or respected in any form thank you very much.

“I don’t know what in the Nine Realms you want,” Loki growled, his eyes flickering back toward the battle just a breath away, really, “but this is  _ really not a good time,  _ and if knew what was good for you you'd leave now, before--"

Around the wizard’s neck hung a badly-crafted medallion, open and shining into an Infinite power.

Loki blanched.

“Oh,  _ fuck.”  _ He frantically turned, keeping his eyes on Thanos and his ‘children’ as the Hulk took yet another blow. He hissed to the sorcerer, “Leave, now! You have the Stone—Thanos is here, you idiot, get that paperweight as far away as possible,  _ do it now—” _

The wizard only moved closer. “I need your help.”

Loki glared daggers at him. “I’m a bit  _ fucking busy.” _

“I know,” the wizard sighed, and Loki saw his eyes darting to Thanos as he came into view beyond the hallway opening. He thought the man might have paled, just slightly, hands starting to shake even further. Wisely, the wizard flattened himself to the wall beside Loki. “Listen, my name is Doctor Strange, and I’m from the future.”

Loki stared at him.

“What.”

"I'm from the future. After Thanos. And I need your help."

“ _ Obviously _ , _ ”  _ Loki growled. “But you deal with your timestream, I'll deal with mine, m'kay? I'd rather not fracture the universe anymore than  _ completely  _ necessary."

He was on edge, and as he glanced back around— _ fuck,  _ Thor was moving,  _ no, brother, you idiot, don’t— _

Noseless’s power simply caged Thor to the Earth again. Loki breathed a sigh of relief—at least their new king was still alive.

The wizard was still talking. “Oh, fantastic, so you know how this works."

Loki wanted to stab him. "Yes, I do. I’m not a savage, after all. I know that I can't leave this moment in time to change anything in the past without creating an alternate universe with unknown consequences in which I will be stuck,” he recited, quoting his lessons from long ago. “I know that meddling with the future can't do anything better."

“True,” Doctor Strange said, hands still trembling. “But not complete."

Loki snarled. "I don't have time for this!"

"Wait! Just—wait. You can't go back in time to change the present you just came from; that's basic logic. But sometimes, the alternate timeline—a parallel universe born from a split in its original—is exactly what we need."

Loki was vibrating, his hands nearly slicing themselves on the knives that were appearing and disappearing in his grip. “Except that it isn't this timeline! You'd be helping nothing! Now please—”

The wizard lifted a hand, as if to silence Loki. The knives materialized again.

“But what if said timeline, the one splintered from ours, could become this timeline? It was born from this one; what if we could merge them together again?"

Loki’s face kept twisting. “I’m not here for  _ hypotheticals. _ ”

His people were dying, his brother was  _ dying— _

Loki continued, “Even if that were possible, we'd have no idea what the consequences would be.”

Strange’s voice came fast. “Except it is possible. With all the Infinity Stones, the very universe is at your command. And I do know what the consequences would be.”

“Of two entirely different worlds colliding?” Loki scoffed. “No."

“They wouldn’t be entirely different. I would.”

“No.”

“ _ Yes.  _ Loki, listen to me. We have a chance here."

Loki’s knife moved nearly of its own accord, flattening itself to the base of this irritating doctor’s throat. “‘We?’” he snarled. “There's never been any 'we', wizard. The last time I saw you, you attempted to kill me."

"That's factually incorrect in multiple accounts, for one thing, and for the other—" he pointed toward the doorway, not looking the least bit phased by the blade at his throat— “that makes us a we.”

Loki followed his finger. “Thanos?”

“Yes.”

“I assume you—” Loki took a long breath and steeled himself— “ _ we,  _ loose then.”

Strange closed his eyes. But in the moment before his swirling irises were hidden, Loki saw an emotion so turbulent that it almost made him lose his balance. “Yes,” he said quietly. “We do.”

Loki shook his head. “How can merging a timeline fix anything? The power it'd release... it'd be just as likely to tear the universe even more."

“Because we don't need to merge two universes,” Strange explained. “We need to merge two bonded timestreams, held in parallelity by an identical source of energy."

_ “Oh?”  _ Loki cooed sarcastically. “And what’s that?”

"An Infinity Stone. This Infinity Stone.” Shaking hands indicated the necklace around the wizard’s throat, its chain brushing against Loki’s knife. “It belongs to this universe, but if you take it into a new one, it'll chain the two timelines together. No matter how different the events of the two universes, they will be forced to be parallel and thus mergeable."

Loki raised a hand. “Hold up,” he hissed.  _ “Me?” _

"Yes you, why do you think I'm here?”

Loki pressed the knife into Strange’s soft skin, smirking when the wizard flinched involuntarily. "You go back and do you're own dirty work."

The wizard just smiled, and it was sad and depthless and swirling with a thousand memories and untold stories. “It has to be you."

Loki found himself stepping back, fearful of the pure  _ power  _ in that gaze. Who  _was_ this wizard, truly?

Thor’s voice echoed through the ship, sudden and heart-wrenching.  _ “No!”  _ his brother screamed. 

Loki turned just in time to see Thanos wrench the glaive from Heimdall’s chest.

It took him a long moment to realize that whine in his ears came from him.

“You’re going to die, for that,” Thor hissed, but despite the thundering strength of every storm in the Nine Realms beneath the words, it was nothing compared to Thanos.  
“Listen,” Strange said, forcing Loki’s attention back to him. “It _has to be you.”_

"Like  _ hell  _ it does!” Loki’s voice ripped from between his teeth with such violence it sliced his tongue on his canines. “I can't leave here, I can't abandon him--"

"Loki.” The wizard’s voice only grew softer, kinder. “You're about to die."

His world screeched to a halt. “What?"

“That's why I came here. Because you're the only person who can do this without splitting our timeline twice--once from surviving, and the second from time-travel." 

Strange reached out, as if to touch him, but Loki swatted his hand away. 

“But…” he began. He couldn’t find words to continue protesting. 

“You die. You're about to go out there and take on Thanos. And he's about to choke the life out of you while your brother watches. You die.” The wizard’s face was unreadable.

“But maybe... maybe you don't,” Strange continued. “Maybe you simply disappear. Maybe the body Thanos chokes is just another one of your doubles, another trick of your magic, because you've taken the Time Stone and disappeared into a parallel universe of your own creation."

“Me.”

“You. It has to be you, don't you see?” 

Quite a lot of things were starting to make sense. “Yes,” Loki hissed, imagining his blade in this man’s gut, imagining twisting it. “Yes, I do see. I see you've trapped me. Because if I don't do this, I'm splitting the universe anyway, aren't I? If I try to survive, if I do survive, you've forced me into an alternate universe.”

Strange looked away. “I’m sorry.”

“In this alternate universe, I'm going to kill you so slowly you won't even remember your name by the end of it.”

“I'll take that as a yes, then,” Strange said with a sardonic sort of smile. 

"Fuck you, Wizard." 

A cry came from the dock of the ship—but not of Thor, not of the Asgardians Loki was supposed to, had failed to protect. Thanos had gripped the second stone. Loki felt the power flutter through the ship, and he shivered. They were running out of time.

He asked, "what do I need to do?"

“Go back in time and raise hell,” was the doctor’s response. 

“Oh, I can do that.”

“Far enough back that you can have a chance against Thanos,” Strange continued. “Late 2016, early 2017 should be fine.”

“Just a year and a half?”

Strange’s gaze grew distant. “Oh is it 2018? That's right, it is."

“Focus,” Loki hissed.

“Right. Take the Stone, start the preparations. Keep yourself alive, and protect the Stone at all costs. Obviously. Find me from the past—I'll be able to help you and explain everything, if you tell me what I told you here.” Strange looked frantic--right. Loki's moment of death was fast approaching, and their chance to have this conversation without destroying the universe.

“The Stone should be ready—I've already worked out the spell. Just let it in, think of 2016, throw in a dash of your translocation magic to keep yourself from ending up in 2016 empty space, and it'll—”

Loki interrupted, “I know how magic-fueled time travel works, thank you very much.” 

Strange, nodding, reached into his robes with ever-shaking hands. He drew something out—something that looked folded and thin and paperish. “And take this.”

“What is it?” Loki demanded, snatching it from the man.

“A list. Of the people you're going to need to find and get together for the battle. People you need to get to trust each other. A few of them are more stubborn than others. Including me. And T—Stark.”

“Stark?” Loki glanced up sharply. “Of-fucking-course.”

 “I need to go,” Strange said, glancing toward the doorway. “Your death-knoll is ringing. You need to use the Stone, send me back.”

Carefully, he pried the immensely powerful relic from its niche around his neck. Loki saw the Stone floating above his fingers, wreathed by some sort of aura as he cast it through thin air to Loki’s hand. As if compelled, Loki grabbed it.

“It’ll be up to me to return when I need to,” Strange said. “You just need to give me its power, let me siphon it for the trip back to the future.” He smiled, as though he’d made a joke.

“Alright,” Loki said hesitantly. He’d used an Infinity Stone before, he knew how to tap its energy, but never this one. This one felt… different. “Here goes.”

Loki wretched fingers of green light around the wizard before him and  _ pushed. _

Strange disappeared with a reality-altering _poof_ _. _

And Loki, taking a deep breath, turned to face his impending doom.

* * *

 

Contrary to popular belief, one doesn’t choke on death immediately upon entering the empty expanse of space. Which was lucky for the wizard who suddenly found himself floating in it. 

Stephen knew enough about the human physiology and the laws of gas expansion to realize that he should exhale as the external pressure dropped to nothingness. Without his lungs in danger of rupture, he had about fifteen seconds before he lost consciousness, and two minutes before his body would start to retain permanent damage. 

Mind fuzzy from the lack of oxygen and air pressure, Stephen swiped his hand in a somewhat awkward, circular motion. A trail of sparks sputtered behind it, then died.

_ Come on, come on… _

His vision was darkening. Five seconds.

The portal opened on his second try, and Stephen was caught for a moment as the air of Earth’s atmosphere  _ exploded  _ through the gateway. The pressure was insane, and if the strange pull of the planet’s gravity toward and into the portal hadn’t taken hold, Stephen would have been blasted into unreachable space.

Something wet and soft and familiar wrapped around his wrist.

With a flapping heave, Stephen was yanked through the portal onto cold ground, his magic spluttering out in an instant. Both sorcerer and rescuer dropped abruptly as the air rush cut off with the closing of the portal. 

Stephen coughed something inarticulate, his tongue feeling like it was boiling, his whole body aching. The ground was frigid, but not as frigid as the vacuum had been, and he curled up on it, shivering.

He couldn’t open his eyes, he found as something slapped his cheek. They were swollen shut.

Vaguely, he thought that made sense. Water in soft tissue would vaporize in the lack of atmospheric pressure; it would decrease soon, now that he was back. 

Was that why his tongue hurt? Saliva boiling off?

Stephen groaned, a hand ratcheting out to stop the flapping of whatever it was slapping him. The thing wrapped around him, wet and quilted, and Stephen remembered with a jolt.

Blinking his eyes open despite the burning pain in his eyelids, Stephen focused on the Cloak of Levitation.

“Hey,” he murmured, flexing his fingers in its grip.

The Cloak slapped him again, harder.

“Shit— _ ow!”  _ Stephen rolled sideways, his hands bracing against the snow that lined the asphalt around them. “I just came back from the future, asshole, give me a—”

_ Wait. _

Snow?

Grunting with the effort, Stephen shoved himself up, propping himself back on fisted hands. It hadn’t been snowing when he left.

“How long…” Stephen glanced up at the Cloak, which hadn’t let go of him, hadn’t released its grip on his skin, as though reassuring itself he was still there. “How long was I gone?”

Days? Weeks?

The Cloak brought its corners together and stretched them apart, out and out and out. 

Stephen swallowed hard. “Better get going then,” he croaked. 

The Cloak helped him to his feet, and they stumbled through another fizzling portal together. The only thing keeping Stephen upright as the dusty New York Sanctum opened before them, the Cloak carefully lowered its charge onto the floorboards.

Stephen leaned into its embrace. “Shit,” he breathed, blinking through another surge of aching in his abdomen. He hadn’t been expecting this little escapade to be so goddamn  _ painful—  _

“Strange,” came a tight, angry voice. 

Stephen looked up.

He probably should have expected this, what with Wong’s assurance that he and the Masters would be able to feel any reality-altering use of the Time Stone. Add his disappearance to that, and the welcome wagon of a dozen furious sorcerers was really rather logical. 

“Hey,” Stephen coughed, waving nonchalantly. “Anyone want to tell me the date?”

No one answered for a long moment. 

“Twenty-seventh of February.” Wong’s voice was strangely soft.

“Oh, nice,” Stephen said. “Only a day off, then—”

“2026.”

Stephen stared.

Expression unreadable, Wong flicked his hand, and the Masters began to spread around Stephen like they would a dangerous relic. 

“What?” Stephen said, unable to tear his gaze away from Wong. “No, that can’t—I’ve been gone for  _ two years?” _

“You left this Sanctum, and this world, undefended,” Wong said. The sorcerers had completed their circle, their hands raised, and Stephen was slowly beginning to realize what this was. 

“You broke every law of our Order,” Wong continued, and there was something like sorrow in his eyes as he stepped forward. “You broke every law of our Multiverse.”

“But I did it,” Stephen murmured, unable to contain his sudden, jaw-splitting smile. “It’s all up to them, now.”

Stephen was still smiling when the ropes of orange energy bound his wrists behind his back and locked his magic beneath a world-bending pressure. He was smiling when Wong spoke in a monotone growl, “Doctor Stephen Strange, you are accused.”

He was smiling when he heard the apology beneath those words, the relief that Stephen had returned. 

This universe could do whatever it wanted to him, now. Stephen no longer felt the weight of a stolen Time Stone; instead, he felt the pull of a split universe, yearning to return to wholeness. He could almost swear he tasted the determination of the inhabitants.

And though he knew he should, knew he’d torn Loki away from his destiny, forced a world to a place no one could predict, Stephen couldn’t make himself regret what he’d done.

_ Come back to us. _

It would be a hard journey, a universe-hopping, world-changing quest of villains and heroes, success and failure, pain and joy, and everything in between. But if anyone could find and save a sister universe, if anyone could save their own from an entirely different reality, if there was anyone Stephen believed in, it was the man at the center of all of this. 

Tony Stark had never failed them before, and it was damn time they stopped thinking he would. 

It was time to start hoping again. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


END OF PART ONE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> BOOM BABY!


	43. Shred of Human Decency

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi again!

PART TWO: YOU ARE THE SUN AND I AM JUST THE PLANETS, SPINNING AROUND YOU

 

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

By some last dregs of self-control, Loki kept himself from shifting that night. 

As the doctors moved Stark, Loki swept his arm beneath the knees of his undead boy of spiders, lifting him from the grass. Someone stiffened across from him, but Loki paid them no heed. He was too fucking tired to deal with any of that, not right now. 

Peter needed to be awake for that. But Odin damn him if anyone was disturbing the boy now. 

So Loki cradled the surprisingly light, filthy hero to his chest and followed the doctors. A few glanced behind them, looking more confused and resigned then scared, and Loki wondered how much insanity they’d seen in their time here that made them regard him like he was just another face. Probably far too much for their wages. 

It was refreshing, though. Loki let himself bask in the way the people just… ignored him, just carried the stretcher between them because he wasn’t that important, not if he wasn’t bleeding out. Which he didn’t plan to do. 

Peter shifted a bit, head falling against Loki’s shoulder. The god swallowed hard—he wasn’t quite sure how to deal with sleeping Peter.

He wasn’t quite sure how he’d deal with awake Peter either. Awake Peter after… after he’d nearly killed Tony Stark. 

_ ‘You don’t get to blame yourself.’ _

Loki shook his head. “I am having a rather difficult time  _ not,”  _ he murmured to the curly head in his arms. 

Between the white coats reflecting dim moonlight, Loki could see a glint of dark hair and blood-covered skin. He remembered with visceral clearness how it had felt when his teeth had sunk into the man’s flesh, how he’d  _ popped  _ like the rupturing skin of a fruit. 

Helheim, Loki knew how Stark’s blood tasted. 

He shuddered. He’d enjoyed that taste, let it coat his teeth and tongue, what kind of monster—

_ Stop,  _ said a voice in his head that sounded like Peter.  _ You don’t get to blame yourself.  _

Besides, maybe… maybe Loki was allowed to think that it would be fine. Maybe he was allowed to believe, just for a moment, that Stark would live, that all would be forgiven, that this world could be saved. 

The doctors moved fast, their gait almost a run but their movements smooth. They hardly jostled the man on the stretcher between them. Loki tried to match them, but Peter still bounced jerkingly in his arms, and Loki winced. 

“Sorry,” he said. For someone who’d had no words earlier, he was suddenly feeling almost unsatably talkative. 

_ Sorry. _

His back still itched, like it remembered the wings that had stretched from the center of it not long before. Trotting behind the doctors as they swept into the halls of the Compound, Loki imagined those same wings brushing against the roofing tiles. 

The lights flickered as he past. It took Loki until the doors of the Infirmary to realize that they flickered only above him, for him,  _ at  _ him. It was as though the Compound itself was narrowing its eyes. 

He was too tired to feel unwelcome. 

Instead, he just waved tiredly to the ceiling, not caring what the people around him thought. He slipped into the Infirmary, hanging back as the doctors ducked into the nearest room with their charge. Peter’s weight was numbing his arms. Loki carefully repositioned, and settled to wait.

He didn’t have to wait long. The Colonel and the Woman—Loki didn’t know her name, but her bearing forced him to think of her with a capital anyway—swept forth to stand in front of him, faces like stone. 

“What happened,” the Woman demanded. 

Beside her, the Colonel’s hands were moving; it could have been nonchalant if not for the way one dropped slightly into the coat of his leather jacket, just to the right of his hip. Armed, then. 

Loki raised an eyebrow. 

The Colonel growled. “I didn’t  _ shoot you on sight  _ before because my best friend was dying at your feet. I’m not shooting you now because you’re fucking carrying his do-gooder of a charge. If you think I’ll hesitate—”

“Yes, yes,” Loki sighed. He would have waved a dismissive hand if they had not both been occupied with the body in his arms. “No reason to trust me, all of that. I don’t blame you. But the Man of Spiders here needs a bed and probably some food, a call to his Aunt, and an update to his friends.”

They stared at him.

“Listen, Midgardians,” Loki said, carefully controlling his voice. They were acting rationally, he reminded himself. If Thanos had appeared above his brother’s nearly-dead body, and then started carrying Bruce, Loki’d be pretty unnerved too. 

He told himself that, reminded himself he was evil to these people, as the frustration mounted. Understand, empathize,  _ you aren’t a villain anymore. _

“A great many things have changed since when you first met me. Not enough for me to deserve an iota of your trust—” evil to them, evil to them— “but enough for me to deserve your help. You work to save the universe, correct?”

The Woman nodded. Her shoulders were pulled back, chin raised; razor sharp and dangerous, she reminded Loki of Valkyrie.

“I’m from the future,” Loki explained. “I was sent back against my will to save your shithole of a timeline.”

They stared at him.

Then the Colonel huffed some combination of a laugh and a sigh. “God knows that’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard this week.”

Loki tried not to be offended.

“How do we know—” the Woman began, though Loki cut her off before she could ask the obvious question.

“That I’m not lying? That I, who’s very name is that of falsehood, tell a whole truth?” Loki chuckled, tired and black. “You don’t. But here I stand, carrying the boy I’ve killed and almost died for, without a weapon or a spell or a disguise. It’s your decision on what to do next, but I gave Peter my oath that I would call his aunt and friends, and that I would be alright.”

To Loki’s eternal shock, the Colonel’s hand fell from his weapon. The man grunted, but before he could speak, Loki said, “you drop your firearm?”

“What?” 

The Woman raised her eyebrows at the Colonel, who looked a bit sheepish. But he turned to Loki and shrugged, murmuring through gritted teeth, “I  _ suppose  _ you can’t be a complete monster.”  

Loki’s eyebrow quirked up again. “And why is that, pray tell?”

“Because only someone with no shred of human decency could fail to be completely endeared to Peter Parker and his well-being in more than five seconds.”

That startled a chuckle out of Loki. Peter shifted slightly in his grip, and Loki readjusted again. 

“Bed, then?” Loki asked. 

The Woman sighed. “I don’t like this, Rhodey.”

“Neither do I,” agreed the Colonel—Rhodey. “But he’s a fucking shape-shifter, and he carried Tony home on dragon wings, and I have to deal with that criminal webbed to our lawn, and I really don’t think we have any other choice.”

Loki thought he was going to like this man. 

* * *

 

 “So, you’re still alive then.”

Loki glanced up as Peter spoke, and Peter watched his thoughtful expression morph into a tired smile. 

“Still alive then,” Loki agreed, holding out a hand.

Peter accepted it, pulling himself up into a seated position on the bed. He was in another one of those elegantly efficient hospital rooms, swathed in milky sheets, though he didn’t hurt this time. That was good, he figured. 

Then he remembered.

“Oh shit, is Mr. Stark—” 

“Stable condition,” Loki assured. “Only told me after I threatened them with a knife.”

“Mr. Loki…”

“I’m kidding, I would be dead if I had done that. That Colonel Rhodey is even more skittish than a Sigelack.”

Peter waited.

Loki blinked.

Then: “Oh, don’t have those either?”

“Nope.”

“Right, well anyway. He’s threatened to kill me, and that Woman in the heels is…” Loki trailed off, grimacing slightly.

“Terrifying?” Peter supplied, hoping he was thinking of the same person.

“Exactly.”

Good; he was.

Peter swung his legs over the edge of the bed, just barely avoiding getting tangled in the sheets. He was still in his filthy, dusty, makeshift spider-suit, and it tracked grimy streaks across the pristine bedclothes. He winced. 

“Did you explain?” he asked. Pushing himself to his feet, he slipped behind Loki on his way to the door. For no reason, really, but to peek out and take stock of his location. This room was windowless.

“Not truly,” Loki replied. He sidled up next to Peter, laying a hand on his shoulder.

Peter glanced down at it, then covered it with his own. He chuckled as Loki stiffened in surprise. 

“I’m alive,” Peter said, patting the hand once before dropping his own.

Defensively, Loki muttered, “I know!” 

Peter jabbed the god in the side, and Loki stumbled back, grimacing at him. Peter just grinned innocently. 

Then he released his breath, glancing back at the door. He leaned against it and crossed his legs, feeling awkward, feeling impatient—he wanted to get  _ out  _ of this room, honestly, who’d decided to make these things so small?

“I thought…” Loki’s voice came quiet and small. Like he’d transformed again, but it hadn’t quite reached his body. “I thought I’d lost you, alright? I thought you were dead, and I’d never get to say I forgave you.”

Peter’s gaze snapped to the god’s. 

“I know you said we aren’t friends, or teammates, but—”

“No!” Peter’s voice exploded almost unprompted. He softened it with an effort. “No I, I didn’t mean that, I didn’t—”

Loki smiled, lifting a finger to shush him. Not sure what else to do, Peter obliged, still stuck in his awkward position between running and leaning. 

“It’s alright,” Loki said. “We don’t have to be friends, or teammates. But I would…”

Loki’s words trailed off, and he swallowed, like he was finding the words inside him, somewhere deep and maybe not so empty anymore. 

“I would like to call you my brother in arms.”

Peter’s eyes widened. 

Loki was watching him with a smirk, and Peter could see he was ready to dismiss the words on a moments notice, at any sign that Peter wouldn’t accept them. But the vulnerability behind flashing green eyes assured Peter he meant what he said.

Words stuck in his throat, like they always did, but Peter didn’t let that stop him. He threw himself forward, rolling over the balls of his feet to crash into Loki as a laugh danced breathlessly through his teeth, his hair.

Loki caught him with the ease of a warrior, not that Peter had ever doubted. 

Neither of them said anything for a long, long moment.

Then Peter stepped back, keeping his hands on his friend’s—his  _ brother in arms’ _ —shoulders.

He grinned. “Does this mean you have to call me Odinson?”

Loki, green eyes flashing and filthy clothes shining, threw back his head and laughed. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	44. You Deserve It

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

“That looks good,” Peter said, craning over the face of the cafeteria table. 

“Of course it looks good, but does it look  _ right?”  _ Michelle didn’t look up from the sketchbook, hunched and scribbling. 

“I can’t believe you saw a  _ dragon,”  _ Ned squeaked. He pressed close to Peter to try and see Michelle’s drawing. “I can’t—that was all just so crazy—”

“Shut it, Leeds.” Michelle raised a hand, closing her fingers in his face. “You’re throwing me off.”

Ned obligingly stopped talking, and Peter turned his attention back to the drawing unfolding beneath Michelle’s pencil. 

He hadn’t been paying an immense amount of attention to Loki’s dragon form when he’d seen it, a bit preoccupied by the man dying at his feet. But Michelle hand wrung every detail from him. On the travel-sized pad, she was building a rendition of the dragon in almost blueprint-like precision. 

“The wings were wider,” Peter said as MJ shaded another line. “More barbed on the webbing side and almost concave on the other side.”

She nodded, humming, and turned the pencil around. 

“I wonder if it has hollow bones,” she muttered. “Even with wings double the length of its form—”

“It wouldn’t be able to support that much weight,” Peter finished. 

She looked up at him. 

“What?”

Shaking her head, the girl looked back down again. 

“I think,” Peter continued, tapping his chin, “that it might be magic. Like, they come from a different realm; maybe there’s a channeled power that distributes energy in a different way?”

“That’d make sense,” Ned said. 

“What was the skin texture?” Michelle wondered. A long swoop of her pencil curled Loki’s tail around his wickedly clawed talons. 

“Um…” Peter wracked his brain. “Around the dip before his shoulder blades it was like alligator skin? But the plates were wider and harder and the tops were smooth. They sort of lengthened down near the front of his neck and underside of his body and tail, and were a lighter color? I don’t remember what they were like on his neck.”

“Like this?” Michelle spun the sketchbook, displaying a somewhat messy rendition of Peter’s words. There was a little cartoon alligator grinning above the shaded area. 

“Yeah,” Peter said, nodding.

They lapsed into silence as Michelle began her preliminary crosshatching, humming that same tune under her breath. Peter frowned, trying to identify it. 

Then a whisper of another voice reached his enhanced ears, and Peter sat up. He turned, pivoting onto his knees so he could peer out of the cafeteria. Through the legs of a passing gaggle of freshmen, the hallway could be seen. 

“I’ll be, uh,” Peter began.

He didn’t end up finishing, trotting toward the exit and pushing through the group of kids. “Excuse me, uh, sorry,” he mumbled. He broke into the hallway with an audible  _ pop,  _ and picked up his pace to catch the girl and woman passing down it.

“Liz!” he called. “Hey, Liz!”

She turned, passing a lightning-quick wrist over her cheeks to try and hide the tears he could see in her posture. Guilt reached clawed hands around his ankles. Peter could only half shake it away. 

“Listen, I… I just wanted to say I’m sorry,” Peter began, stopping a few feet from the girl. 

She raised her chin. “You say that a lot. What are you sorry for this time?”

She fought to keep the words even, but Peter heard the bite of anger and grief beneath them. He didn’t blame her. 

Failing to answer, he simply looked at his feet, unable to continue to meet her eyes.

“The dance?” she supplied. “Yeah, that was a pretty crappy thing to do.”

Peter looked back up, drawing the words from somewhere far too close to his heart. “Well, yeah, but I... I mean, your dad... I can’t imagine what you’re going through. If there’s anything I can do to help…”

She looked away, swallowing hard. Peter could see more tears gathering in her eyes. 

“I guess we’re moving to Oregon. Mom says it’s nice there, so that’s cool.” She shrugged. “Anyways, Dad doesn’t want us here during the trial, so…”

“Liz,” Peter tried, stepping forward, “I—”

“Look, Peter.” Liz moved away, back toward her mother, back toward whatever normalcy she still had. “Whatever’s going on with you, I hope you figure it out.”

Then she was gone.

And Peter turned and walked back to the cafeteria. 

“So,” Ned said, glancing up at him. “How did it go?”

Peter slumped onto the bench like a bag of potatoes, various knobby bones knocking painfully into the hard plastic. “She’s moving to Oregon.”

“Oof,” Ned said obligingly.

“Well you did almost kill her dad and ditch her on homecoming night to do it,” Michelle said without looking up.

“Thanks, Michelle, I hadn’t noticed,” Peter sighed. He let his forehead thump onto the table before him. “I am a disaster. A complete disaster.”

“Set your snake on her.” Michelle was still unimpressed.

Peter sat up, rearranging himself in the table. “Loki’s at the Compound,” he explained. “He’s probably in snake form actually.”

“Still absolutely shocked that no one has tried to kill him yet,” Ned said.

“They have.” Peter looked back at the exit, guilt still clutching at his throat. He couldn’t so much as hear a door close as a last sign of Liz. 

“Hey.” Ned put a hand on his shoulder. “You did the right thing.”

“Did I?” Peter mumbled. “She’s lost her father. That sucks, it sucks more than anything.”

“But you stopped a criminal,” Ned insisted. “You saved New York.”

“But I… did I really? They were just a couple of weapons dealers that got out of their league, and only because me and Loki forced them to. I don’t… I…”

“Hey.” Michelle looked up, capturing his eyes as she glared at him. “What’s done is done, alright? You made a mess of it, maybe—”

“Thanks,” Peter muttered.

“—but at the end of the day, you saved a good many people from an honest threat. You befriended the prince of Asgard.”

“And I almost killed Tony Stark.”

“And yourself,” Michelle agreed. “And aforementioned prince of Asgard. But you didn’t kill Toomes.”

Peter waited for her point. 

But she just looked back down, resuming her sketch.

“And?” Peter finally asked. “Is that good? Bad? Are you condemning it?”

She raised an eyebrow. “No, you idiot, it’s a compliment. You were trying to stop someone hell-bent on killing you. And you got closer to killing yourself and your allies before you would ever voluntarily put your  _ enemy _ in mortal danger.”

Peter frowned. “Because he hadn’t really done anything… I’m not a vigilante, I just catch people.”

“Because you’re a hero,” Michelle stated, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

“Oh,” Peter said.

Ned elbowed him. “See? You’re a good person, and no guilt-tripping criminal can change that, Peter Parker.”

_ Murderer.  _

Peter swallowed and didn’t answer. 

“So what are you doing now?” Michelle asked. “With Loki and Stark and everything?”

Peter shrugged. “Not sure. We have to wait until Mr. Stark wakes up; he’s unconscious while the nanobots do their work. Should be done in the next day or two? They’re really fantastic pieces of technology.” 

Michelle hummed again. “And you’re positive he won’t… I dunno, completely dismiss you and imprison your snake buddy?”

“Ye—well, no, not _technically,”_ Peter mumbled. “I just… I have a feeling that he won’t.”  
“A feeling.” Michelle looked unimpressed. 

“Yes, Michelle, a feeling.” Peter lifted his chin, drawing strength from somewhere to stare her down. 

She watched him for a long, long moment, a curl of hair drifting down in front of her face. 

Then she looked down, pencil twirling between elegant fingers. “My friends call me MJ,” she said.

Peter and Ned exchanged a look. “What?”

“I thought…” Ned shrugged. “I thought you didn’t have any friends.”

A bit of a smile quirked her lip to the side as she glanced up at them again. “I didn’t.”

Then, humming, she began to finish off the dragon beneath her fingers, leaving Peter and Ned gaping at each other. 

“Oh.” Peter settled back, tapping his fingers on the underside of the table. “Right.”

With a snap, he realized the song she was humming was ‘Reflections’ by The Neighborhood.

* * *

 

Tony had never been one to wake up in stages. He was an all-or-nothing kind of guy, at least when it came to being asleep.

“And when it comes to getting injured, apparently.”

The voice beside his bed was laughing silently; Tony could just tell. The ceiling tiles were doing it too, all white and marbled with blue in the light streaming through the curtained window. He scowled at them and hoped they’d transfer the expression to the woman at his side. 

“There was a dragon, give me a break,” Tony sighed. His voice sounded like pebbles scraping over asphalt, and it tasted of the tar that would break up. Tony’s scowl deepened. 

“That dragon flew you home,” Pepper pointed out. “And then promptly transformed into one of your recurring nightmares, called for help, and carried your sleeping Spider-Charge in to bed.”

Tony, on instinct, tried to sit up. He immediately thought better of it as his skin pulled and warped strangely within his bandages. “Peter?” he asked, flopping back onto the bed with a defeated sigh. “How is he?”

“Just the kid? You aren’t going to ask about the fucking Asgardian Rhodey’s been trailing with his gun for the last six days?”

“Five  _ days?”  _

“Still?” Pepper was laughing again. “Still not gonna ask about it?”

“I don’t know what to make of Loki,” Tony grated in response. He smacked his teeth, but the awful taste of his breath just spread over to the back of his throat. “But I do know what to make about the kid—is he alright? Is his aunt waiting outside the room to jump me? The fuck is happening anymore?”

“Peter Parker is perfectly alright,” Pepper said. Tony felt the sheets shift as she adjusted them. They didn’t snag, and Tony figured she’d bitten off her fingernails again. His fault. “He crashed for a while, and when the doctors went in to check on him and found him almost completely healed, hugging the aforementioned object of your recurring nightmares like his life depended on it.”

“Hugging  _ Loki?”  _ Tony tried to sit up again.

Pepper, smiling slightly, pushed him back down. Her hand lingered on his collarbone. “You jealous?” she chuckled.

“What?”

“Never mind. Anyway, Loki insisted we call his aunt, and these two kids Ned and Michelle, and wouldn’t stop  _ lurking  _ until we did.”

Tony huffed, swallowing another mouthful of concrete saliva. 

“Both Parkers are here; we invited them and they’ve been coming each day after Peter gets out of school. Though the boy sometimes ‘disappears’ and his aunt has to work. She’s here now.” 

Tony managed a slight turn of his head toward the door. “Waiting out there to murder me?”

“No, she was very concerned about your well-being.”

“So that she could render it broken when she saw me next.”  
He could _hear_ Pepper rolling her eyes. “Why are you so worried about this? She’s a _nice_ woman!”

“You? And her? Oh  _ shit.” _

“Tony…”

“I almost killed her nephew,” Tony sighed. He wanted to do something which his hands, fiddle, but the one attached to his injured shoulder wasn’t expressly movable and the other felt heavier than an eight-year-old elephant. “There was a solid five minutes where he basically was dead, for all I knew.”

“Oh.” He didn’t have to be looking to know the expression on Pepper’s face, but he flicked his eyes in her direction anyway. 

“Then I tried to kill Loki,” Tony said, “and it didn’t go so well. He tried to kill me. It went slightly better.”  
“Why are we letting him live and sleep in our Compound then—” Pepper began.

Tony waved the question. “People try to kill me all the time, apparently. And we let them live and sleep in our Compound.”

Pepper’s expression darkened. She didn’t reply.

“Sorry.” The urge to scrub his face was almost insatiable. 

“No, no.” Pepper patted the edge of the bed. “It was relevant. I’m honestly surprised you’ve been so… civil about all that.”  
“I wasn’t in Siberia.”

“You weren’t supposed to be.”

Tony sighed, his mouth dry, and closed his eyes. “Sure. Whatever.” He continued before she could speak again, “but yes, Peter is fine?”

“Asks FRIDAY about you every two seconds, but otherwise, yeah.”

Tony huffed a bit of a laugh. The bed squeaked slightly with the movement of his torso, and he managed to turn his head just a bit more. He could see Pepper without much headache, now.

“Where’s the Asgardian?” 

“Detained. FRIDAY’s focused every iota of her attention on him, and Rhodey’s never been more on-edge. We need to get this sorted. The kid, too.”

A cough climbed out of Tony’s throat; it rocked his injured side and he winced. “FRIDAY?” he called.

The ceiling brightened excitedly. “Boss! You’re awake!”

“Don’t pretend to be surprised, FRI. I know you were eavesdropping.”

“There are no eaves, sir, and I have no eyes.”

“Nuance,” Tony smiled at the camera in the corner. 

The lights dimmed, then brightened again, accompanied by FRIDAY’s laugh. The emotion in it was limited—Tony should fix that—but he could tell what his girl was feeling by the speed of the brightening ceiling. “I am glad you are awake.”

“Me too.”

“What do you need?”

Tony hummed. “Tell the kids and the Asgardians and the Avengers to get their asses in here. I want to know exactly what’s going on, and I want to know now.”

“Yes, boss!” The lights dimmed as FRIDAY turned her consciousness elsewhere.

“Telling you to rest more’s not gonna work, I assume?” Pepper wondered with a fond, frustrated grin. 

Tony gave her his best innocent grin. It tasted like car tires. “Nope!” 

She moved to get up, stretching long arms over her head. “You can catch me up later, I’ll go bother the—” 

His hand was moving before he’d realized, the weight of anesthesia fading suddenly. Pepper paused, glancing down at where Tony’s fingers had wrapped around her wrist.

“Stay,” Tony said. 

“Okay.”

“You should know what’s happening too. You deserve it.”

Settling back next to him, Pepper twisted her hand out of his grip and flicked his uninjured shoulder. “Better believe I do.”

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony's awake!!! And he's ready for some WORDS.


	45. Hear this Explaination

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi!!! Sorry I didn't get to responding to all your comments last chap. Either way, I super appreciate them! Anyway, hello to the new guys and welcome back to the rest of you! :) 
> 
> Onwards! 50 Hogwarts points if you spot the (admittedly not subtle because I am Not Subtle) Good Omens reference.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Peter was sitting with May in the largest, emptiest kitchen he’d ever seen when FRIDAY’s words flickered through the room. 

“Mr. Parker,” she said. “Mr. Stark is awake, and ready for you.”

Peter set down the gargantuan mixing bowl he was currently eating cereal out of, relief sucking his anxious appetite away, and glanced up at the ceiling with wide eyes. “Thank God,” he said. “How long’s he been up? What about Rhodes and…” Peter glanced at May, “the others? Is it explanation time? Is he still in pain or—”

FRIDAY beeped, and Stark’s voice filtered through the area like a loudspeaker. It wasn’t intended for them. “ _ ‘Tell the kids and the Asgardians and the Avengers to get their asses in here. I want to know exactly what’s going on, and I want to know now.’ _ ” 

FRIDAY’s voice returned. “I think he’s doing alright, don’t you?” The lights were flickering softly; Peter’d learned such flickers were FRIDAY’s way of expressing amusement, like dimming the mask’s visor was Karen’s. 

“What are we waiting for?” May asked, standing. “Bring your cereal. A few mouthfuls of carbs isn’t gonna last you until lunch.”

Peter grabbed his bowl and took a steadying breath. “You should stay here,” he said.

May stared at him, oozing disbelief. 

“Yeah, uh,” Peter gestured obscenely. “There’ll be, uh, things, and—”

“Peter.”

Peter shut up on instinct. When May spoke your name like that, you stopped talking. 

“I’ve been wandering about a multi-million dollar airbase-looking whatever this is—” she threw a hand to indicate the silvery kitchen around them— “for a week. One that, for all your supposed internship around here, you’re surprisingly unfamiliar with. The ceiling keeps trying to be my friend, and this—hearing Mr. Stark has woken—is the first time you’ve relaxed in all that time. Oh, and you’re apparently a snake charmer now.”

Peter winced.

“I don’t buy that you don’t know what happened to the man.” May flicked him, taking the cereal bowl from his hand. “I don’t buy your bullshit explanation about what happened Homecoming night, either. And I definitely deserve to hear this explanation.”

Peter looked at her, her warm brown eyes and their earnest pleading to trust her. This was his aunt, his only family, who wanted nothing more than to keep him safe and alive. How could she hear his secret, his ongoing lie, and not… and not reject it? This other piece of him, the piece that knew what was truly important, the piece that let him take his values and act on them? The piece that let him make a difference?

He’d already spent the last three weeks lying about and hiding his Spider-Man exploits from Mr. Stark. He didn’t want to have to lie about and hide them from May, too.

But… wasn’t he already? 

May was his aunt, the wonderful woman who’s banging around woke him up in the morning. Who liked Thai food and cooking, but couldn’t make a recipe work for the life of her. Who was direct and funny and interesting, who’d beaten Pepper Potts at checkers at least five times in the past week. Who he loved. 

She’d been all he had for so long. They shared everything—joy, tears, struggles, love,  _ life.  _ They laughed together, they  _ mourned  _ together, they ate together at little run-down restaurants in downtown Queens. 

When had that changed? When had they started sitting across from each other at stainless steel tables in multi-million dollar Compounds, where only one of them knew why they were here?

Spider-Man was his life, was who he wanted to be. 

And May… didn’t know?  _ What?  _ Because Peter was scared she’d reject it? Because he didn’t trust her enough to understand?

“Alright,” Peter said quietly. “Alright. But first, there’s something you should know, or nothing that… nothing that you see or hear will make sense.”

May smiled, swirling his spoon around the dregs of the cereal. She was still holding the bowl in one hand, balanced against her shoulder, and the spoon between her index and middle fingers. 

“Eight months ago,” Peter began slowly, “well, almost nine, now, I had an accident. I got… bit. By a spider, near some old subway system that connected somewhere strange.”

May was raising her eyebrows, not seeing the relevance yet. Peter forced himself to continue. 

“That was the time when I got really sick, remember? And we didn’t know why, especially when I really suddenly got miraculously better?”  
May nodded, slowly. “I do, yeah.”

“A lot of other miraculous stuff happened that day, too. I got better. In so many ways. I got better hearing, eyesight, taste, smell. I got more agile. I got stronger. I got this strange sense that tells me when bad things are happening or about to happen, that prickles through my gut and down my arms.”

He could see the disbelief on her face—not as much as there should be, but there all the same. Peter pulled his trump card.

“And I got the ability to stick to things, all sorts of things, if I need. At will, and defying the laws of science.” 

Slowly, so she could see everything he did, Peter brushed the tips of his fingers to the spoon that now lay abandoned, fallen halfway down into the mush at the base of the mixing bowl.

May’s eyes widened as he drew it out and held it upside-down, never once wrapping his fingers around it.

“Thing is, Aunt May,” Peter said, unable to look at her, “there’s no Stark Internship. There’s no conferences or scholarships. This is… this is the Avengers, and I’m Spider-Man.”

A long, long silence followed Peter’s declaration. So long he could hear the clock on the microwave strike the minute, so quiet he could hear May’s breathing—or lack thereof.

“What the fuck.”

Peter glanced up, gritting his teeth to try and keep himself from hastily leaping into a looping explanation that’d just make everything worse. Hair drifting a front her face, May’s jaw was hanging comically open. It was a rather gratifying reaction, if Peter was being honest. 

“I know, I know,” Peter murmured as she launched into speech.

“Are you—you’re Spider-Man. You’re the  _ Spider-Man,  _ that little dipshit in tights with the—” she waved an expansive hand— “explosions and shit? And the awesome YouTube channel?”

“You watch my—”

“I can’t believe this.” May threw her hands in the air. Well, she threw one hand, as the other was still securing the bowl of cereal to her body. “No, scratch that, I can’t believe I didn’t realize this. All the days you sneak out? All the trouble you get into? It’s all for… for… My nephew is a superhero.”

“Surprise?”  
“What the fuck.” 

It wasn’t the time, but Peter had to laugh. May was so frazzled, and she didn’t even seem angry. This was shock, and maybe some fear, but she wasn’t anything more than frustrated. Yet. He hoped. 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” May demanded.

Peter shrugged. “At first, I didn’t really know what was going on, you know? It was all so weird, so scary. And by the time I realized they were powers, abilities, things I could use to do good, to stop harm in New York… well, it was sort of late. And then it started to get dangerous, and everything was happening, and I… I was afraid you wouldn’t let me do it anymore. If you knew.”

“So you just kept it a secret? The biggest development of your whole life?” She was hiding it well, but Peter could see the hurt in her eyes. 

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry—” she spluttered for a moment. “You’re sorry. Yeah, well, so am I! Sorry enough to want to ground you’re little— _ ’I’m Spider-Man’ what the fuck—” _

“There’s more?” Peter interrupted hesitantly.

 May stopped, mouth still half-open. She was tensing up again, preparing for the blow, and Peter cringed.

“So… You know the snake? And…” he searched his memory for other forms May might have seen. “And the bird that flew by our car window the day after I got out of recovery from the elevator incident?”

May nodded hesitantly. “Are you going to say they’re radioactive or something? That if I get bit by them I’ll become… snake-woman or something?”

That shocked a laugh out of Peter. He set the spoon back in the bowl, flicking milk of the end of his fingernails, and shook his head. “No, actually, that’d be much less confusing than what I’m about to say.” 

“Just kill me now, I’m ready.”

“Those are the shape-shifted forms of Loki of Asgard?”

_ “WHAT?”  _ There was the anger, the genuine fear. Peter’d made sure to keep Loki and his Aunt apart for the last few days, which hadn’t been hard. Though he tried to keep Peter from noticing, Peter was fully aware Loki was avoiding human form almost more than usual. 

“It’s okay!” Peter was quick to assure, raising his hands placatingly. “It’s… he’s actually a really great guy.”

“Loki. Loki of Asgard, who killed almost 100 people, who brought an army to my home town? Is actually ‘a really great guy?’”

“Yes.” Peter lifted his chin. “He’s sensitive and unique and… a bit sadistic, yes, but he’d never hurt me and he’s here to help.” 

“What. The. Fuck.”

“He’s from the future?”

May just stared. “Okay, that does it. I’ve officially gone mad, or died, or something along those lines. Bloody flaming hell.” 

“I hate to interrupt,” interrupted the ceiling at that exact moment, “but could this explanation be moved to somewhere where we all can hear it?”

“FRIDAY are you  _ hearing  _ this?” May demanded, gesticulating frantically at Peter. “This little asshole opening my eyes?”

“Yes, Mrs. Parker,” FRIDAY agreed obligingly.

“How did I not know this?”

The air conditioner whirred pointedly. “Because Mr. Parker is rather talented and experienced at keeping information from those should be aware of it.”

May raised her eyebrows again. 

Peter coughed. 

“Uh, we should, uh, go see Mr. Stark.”

“Yes, I rather think we  _ should.” _

 

 

Stark had turned the hospital room into a conference hall. 

Peter wasn’t sure how, exactly, but he’d done it. When Peter and May slipped hesitantly through the heavy metal door, there was an awkward circle of chairs arranged to make the man spread horizontally—and grumpilly—across the bed the focal point. 

Pepper and Rhodes were on either side of him, Pepper with her hand on the sheets and Rhodes glaring daggers at Loki. The later sat ramrod straight on the opposite side of the circle, grinning like a snake—and not the hissing sort of smirk he usually had but the sort of wide, unnerving smile of something that had unhinged its jaw. Vision was there too, wearing what looked to be an apron, and Happy had squished himself next to an open chair and was trying to scooch as far away from Loki as possible.  

Peter, rolling his eyes, plunked himself down next to Loki and directly across from Stark. The man’s eyes were trained on him as he moved, and Peter offered a wave.

Stark smiled. 

As the group readjusted to the newcomers, Peter elbowed Loki. “Good to see you as  _ you  _ again.”

Loki grunted. “I see you’re accompanied by your aunt?”

“Yeah… you missed a bit of a show.”

And  _ there  _ was the serpentine smirk, slithering across his brother in arms’ face. “Who said I missed it?”

Peter rolled his eyes. “Colonel Rhodes wouldn’t have let you out of his sight for long enough, don’t even try to lie to me.”

Loki huffed, and Peter smiled, looking down at his hands.

“Alright, so as strangely adorable as you two are,” came a rough, amused voice from the bed, “I’d really love to know why you betrayed, almost killed, and then saved me in such quick succession?”

The attention in the hospital suit turned conference hall snapped to Stark, who was carefully, haltingly easing himself up against the backrest of his bed.

“You know that raises?” May said at the same time Peter exclaimed, “you’re mobile!”

Stark waved a grateful hand in May’s direction, though he continued his inchworm of a crawl upright anyway. “I am indeed mobile,” he said with amusement. “Shocking.”

Peter was about to speak when Loki’s quiet yet pointed words broke into the room.

“My deepest apologies,” the god began, “for the harm I caused you.”

There was silence, all eyes on Loki. 

“It is not worth much, I understand,” Loki continued. “But I hope never to do so again.”

“Then why did you do it in the first place?” Stark wondered. To Peter’s surprise, there was more curiosity than hostility in his voice.

“You shot me.” Loki’s fingers flexed. He glanced at Peter from the corner of his eye, just for a moment. “And… I believed Peter was dead. Shifting forms was involuntary, and there are patterns of behavior in a dragon that are in fact welded into the genes…” 

Loki shrugged, trailing off for a moment, then finished, “It was wrong of me. I am sorry.”

Stark nodded. Just once, just for Loki. 

Then he looked at Peter. “Kid?”

“Yessir?” Peter sat up a little straighter, trying not to look at the bandages peeking through the collar of Stark’s shirt. 

“I’m glad you’re alive.” He smiled tiredly, and Peter smiled back.

“Yes, sir.”

“Now tell me why I should believe him,” Stark commanded, gesturing at Loki.

Peter looked once at his friend, his brother in arms. His gaze traveled to the rest in the room, all leaning imperceptibly forward as they waited for his words. May was almost vibrating, and Rhodes had relaxed a bit. 

Stark was still smiling slightly.

“So, it all started with this wizard,” Peter began.

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah this one wizard guy, what was *up* with him, seriously???? ;)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	46. Nonsense List

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :DDDDDD

 

**Earth-200004:** **_October 2016_ **

 

On the other side of New York, the aforementioned wizard was conducting yet another sweep of the magical signature of his city and contemplating the things that didn’t make any fucking sense. 

There were quite a few of those things, one of which was currently pulsing squarely against his Mystic perception. Stephen had been tracking it for the last few days. He’d noticed it upon his first sweep of New York’s signature, a week and a half ago after he’d returned from Hong Kong. 

He’d never been the mystic guardian of a dimension-protecting sanctuary before, and the job description was simple in theory. Keep people out. Keep relics and treasures in. Work time is spent managing earthly magical signatures and cataloging threats to it. But in practice, the definition of ‘threat’ was astonishingly loose, and the signatures of Earth were more diverse than weather patterns. Stephen had very little idea what constitutes  _ ‘normal’.  _

His first sweep had taken a solid thirteen hours of constant, nonstop spell-casting, for there was just so  _ much.  _ Stephen had sensed it all in awe, his third eye wide. The swirling patterns of the dimension across even Earth were uncanny. Beacons of aggressive energy around western Europe and southeast Asia, a prickling bluish curiosity curled like a hurricane in the Atlantic, silvery splinters of dormance around the auras of large cities. He could sense it  _ all.  _

Each sweep was different. Unique. Which was why Stephen could still stand to carry out the routine repeatedly.

He hated repeats. 

He’d only zeroed in on the blinking source of unusual power when it had changed. Not completely; it still held the same base pulse of energy, but the outward broadcast changed. 

Again and again and again, it changed. 

It didn’t make sense. 

Even when Stephen realized he’d been sensing  _ two  _ signatures—one unmistakably  _ green— _ the second still seemed to bounce around like it was hitching rides in different objects. 

Not a demon though. This didn’t taste like possession. 

Awakened from an uneasy sleep by a surge of violent energy from the individual, Stephen sat bolt upright in his nook within the Sanctum library. He must have fallen from his astral form the night before, as he didn’t remember deciding to sleep. 

It had been a week and a half since he’d  _ decided  _ to do anything of the sort. 

Stephen, shaking the last of the phantom dream perceptions from his mind, proceeded immediately into his location spell.

Muddy brown magic swirled into complex patterns before his swooping arms, energy pinpointing like a compass. 

Which was another thing that made very little sense. Kaecilius had been defeated. The Dark Dimension banished. All was supposedly back to normal, and thus the wrongness that had seeped into every manifestation of this dimension should be gone.

But it wasn’t.

About a month ago, Stephen had been jolted into his astral form by a particularly violent surge of power. And when he’d returned, drawing a questioning portal through this realm, his magic had been a dirty, unhealthy brown instead of its usual gold.

All the sorcerers had made the same discovery, and, as one, were clamoring for answers. The interference of the Dark Dimension through the rogue in their midst shouldn’t have been able to sicken and affect all magic. But their mandalas, their shields, their whips, their weapons—nothing was excluded from the plague falling across the Mystic Arts.

It made Stephen uneasy. It was one of the great many things that made him uneasy.

His mystery energy source had shifted again, and he didn’t recognize this aura. It was larger, more aggressive, and this time, the source did not feel Earthen. 

He couldn’t explain what did feel Earthen, not in positive terms. But the anomaly he’d pinpointed was now exuding something decidedly  _ wrong _ . Almost as wrong as the green pulse it was associated with. 

“Whoa,” Stephen murmured, opening eyes he hadn’t realized had been closed. 

The Cloak perked up from where it had curled, catlike, on the cushion of the seat beside him. Stephen glanced at it, jerking his head at the map of energies currently etching itself in ugly brown magic. 

“Do you feel that?” 

The Cloak fluttered, and Stephen took that as an affirmative. 

The Cloak was on his list of things that didn’t make sense. Mostly because it was  _ still here,  _ even after Hong Kong, even after it had done its duty. He’d just assumed it would go back to Kamar-Taj, to assist with the reconstruction of the London Sanctum,  _ anything.  _

Stephen had gone back to Kamar-Taj for a grand total of two hours. Fifteen minutes had been him returning the Eye. The rest had been him growing more and more uncomfortable as he realized he didn’t know the names of most of the sorcerers who remained at the school. Mordo was gone. The Ancient One was gone. Stephen knew very little who remained, Wong being the exception, and it didn’t make sense; had he really met so few, had he really cared so little?

Apparently so.

“It’s close,” Stephen said, referring to their shifting anomaly. “Like always. But closer.”

Brooklyn, if his ley lines weren’t off. And they were never off. 

The Cloak flapped, and Stephen nodded. “Counts as a threat at this point?”

A bob, and the Cloak was up, shaking out the creases it its heavy fabric and swirling over to rest on Stephen’s shoulders. 

Stephen worked his sling-ring onto shaking fingers and let his energy sweep fizzle into nothing. He turned his attention to portaling instead.

Portals, sweeps, conjuring… it was all easy now. Mechanically, Stephen hardly had to think anymore. Once he’d discovered the full description of a spell within the pages of whatever tome held its secrets, he could cast it first try. A practiced Master, he was. 

He’d become one in a thousand years. In the blink of an eye. 

That little  _ fact  _ had held slots ten through two in the nonsense list. He usually skipped those slots when contemplating. 

It was easier to ignore them.

“Wong!” he yelled, sticking his head through the sparking charcoal portal. “I’ve got something.”

It took a few minutes, but the Librarian emerged from the murky depths of the Kamar-Taj books. His perpetual scowl didn’t exactly  _ lift  _ at Stephen’s words, but there might have been something else besides disapproval in his expression. 

The memory of his chuckle was still clear, though. It had only been a week and a half, after all.

“What?” the librarian demanded. “I’m very busy trying to explain  _ that.”  _ He gestured to Stephen’s portal, indicating the discolored magic. 

“I’m sure. But there’s something off in New York. Two things, and it’s about time we stopped dancing around them.”

Wong sighed, but stepped through Stephen’s portal anyway. “A week of observation and attention is not ‘dancing around’ action,” he said. “It is a necessary and honest procedure for the best—”

“How can waiting be  _ honest?”  _ Stephen interrupted. “Is there any way for waiting to be a falsehood?”

Wong rolled his eyes, sidling up next to Stephen. He lifted his hands, closed his eyes, and stepped back with his left foot. A haze of muddy brown light swirled around him for a moment. 

Then: “Oh.”

“What?”

“Why did you not inform me of—”

“Wong, I swear to God.”

The librarian smirked, then elaborated. “You’re sensing something from another dimension.”

Stephen’s mandalas were already manifesting. “Why didn’t I  _ know—” _

“It’s shielding itself, whatever it is,” Wong said. “But the sensation is wrong.”

Stephen closed his eyes, reaching out toward his little anomaly. “It usually emits two separate signatures. One that changes, and one that’s it core. Sometimes they match.”

“But now?”

“Now…” Stephen bit his bottom lip. “Now there’s two, but the outward one is aggressive. Wrong.”

“That’s because this thing, whatever it is, has taken an off-world form,” Wong explained. 

“A form from a different dimension?”

Wong shook his head. “No. It’s from another dimension, taking the form of something from this one. But the form is from a different realm.”

Stephen recalled a page briefly describing such, and nodded. “Right. An alien signature.”

“Correct.”

“What do I do?” Stephen wondered. 

“You bring it here.” Wong was walking back to the portal. “With such a unique, shifting signature, locating it might take a while. A day or two. And then you’ll have to portal it here, so you’d better hope you’ve visited wherever it is.”

And with that, Wong hopped back across the globe to his books. 

Stephen, smiling a bit, closed the portal behind him. “Right then,” he said to the Cloak, rubbing at one of its hems. “To work.” 

  
  


Four days later, Stephen’s stared in dismay at a computer screen.

Eight times, he’d tried to trace the anomaly with magic. But it was stubborn, elusive; it changed signatures often enough to throw of Stephen’s senses time and time again. It didn’t take the sorcerer long, though, to realize it was only the  _ form  _ that was changing, not the spatial location. The anomaly was holding still.

So Stephen changed techniques. 

“If you tell Wong about this,” he’d whispered the Cloak, sliding into the chair behind the old brick of a computer he’d found in the back of the Sanctum, “I will turn you into a sweater.”

The Cloak turned itself into a sweater and crossed its sleeves, then turned back, and Stephen supposed that rendered his threat inert.

Google Maps had never failed him before, and he doubted it would fail him now.

With one hand, Stephen began to locate himself and the state of New York. With the other, he conjured his spatial map, pinpointing his anomaly and its relation to the nearest ley line. 

Then he reached through a quick portal to snatch an annotated map from Wong’s shelves. The man wouldn’t notice; these were standard issue to the novices. 

Folding the text to the proper location, Stephen lifted both hands and forced his conjuring into the proper alignment. He overlaid it across the map, matching his energy signatures to the ley lines sketched across the atlas. 

The anomaly pulsed menacingly at the curve of a small, upstate road. Something in the recesses of Stephen’s eidetic memory turned over at the name, and he frowned. 

With magical locators transferred into physical ones, the wizard turned his attention the the computer screen. 

“Upstate…” he hummed, shaking fingers struggling to search for the street. He settled for just scrolling and zooming instead, and eventually tracked the street to the curve that matched that of the atlas, in turn matching the anomaly’s location.

He froze.

“Shit,” Stephen murmured, flopping back and running his hands through his hair.

The Cloak fluttered in question, peering at the screen and almost smothering Stephen in the process. He batted it out of the way.

“Good news is I’ve found it,” Stephen told his relic, dismissing his spell and closing the ley line atlas. “Bad news is… well, it’s in the Avengers Compound.”

* * *

 

“Time travel isn’t like they make it seem in the movies and stuff,” Peter explained to the rapt audience before him. Disbelief and excitement ran rampant through the room, and Peter felt like some storyteller in the dark around a campfire. 

“The timeline in our universe is fixed,” he said, glancing at Loki. “Going back in time isn’t as simple as just hopping back and changing the future. Because you’re  _ from  _ that future. You can’t change it; that would create a paradox by totally destroying all the events that happen after your arrival.”

“Right,” Stark murmured. He was leaning forward slightly, his hands clasped atop his knees, eyes alight with interest. 

“So when you  _ do  _ go back in time and start changing stuff, you split the timeline.” Peter pressed his palms together and shoved his fingers apart, miming a divergence. “The only way not to get yourself stuck in an alternate dimension is to not change anything of importance.”

“But I have.” Loki took over. “Obviously.”

“Right,” Peter said. “Loki was forced here by a man called Doctor Strange.”

“I’m from 2018,” Loki said. “The wizard is from much further than that. 2023, if I had to guess. He was very careful not to cause a split to the timeline—which is why I am the one who bares his quest, not he himself or someone more… qualified.”

“When Loki showed up, he split our world.” Peter wrung his hands. “We’re now part of an alternate dimension—trapped in it.”

“What?” Rhodes demanded. “You mean to say—”

“This entire reality is wrong,” Loki agreed. “But it’s a second chance.”

Peter jumped in again. “There’s something coming,” he said. “A threat that every Avenger and former Avenger and so many more couldn’t beat.”

He saw Stark stiffen, saw Vision lean forward, saw Rhodes reach for a nonexistent weapon.

“Thanos,” Loki said quietly. 

“He wants to find the six Infinity Stones that are scattered throughout the universe,” Peter explained. “He wants to use them to wipe out half of all life.”

“Sparing you the bullshit backstory.”

Peter nodded. “Loki traveled here because the wizard gave him one of the Stones. The Time Stone. He also gave Loki a list, which has all the people that’ll be helpful to beating Thanos this time. I’m on it, you’re on it—” he pointed to Stark— “and a bunch of other people too.”

Loki rifled within his tunic for the objects as he began to speak again. 

“We find the Stones, we kill Thanos, and then we use their power to somehow merge this timeline with the timeline I come from,” he said. “Before you ask, I don’t know how, and I can’t even imagine what the mechanics and consequences will be.”

“We couldn’t find the wizard,” Peter explained. “He’s supposed to tell us.”

Stark sat back, his eyes comically wide but his face thoughtful. Everyone was swallowing hard, glancing at each other, and Peter could almost see their brains leaking out their ears. 

Then Loki removed a fist from his pocket and unfurled it to show the now filthy, bloody list and the floating Stone in all their enigmatic glory.

A silence stretched as every eye in the room was drawn to the floating gem, rotating lazily and shining with that piercing lime glow. 

“It’s beautiful,” Vision whispered.

“What can it do?” Rhodes asked, scooching closer.

Loki shrugged. “Manipulate Time, in the universe it comes from. I’m not sure what would occur if you used it in this universe. It doesn’t belong here, after all.”

“So we need your help,” Peter concluded. “We know only half the story, here, but we can’t try and continue on this quest without—”

Peter broke off suddenly, his attention snagged by a sparking beneath Loki’s feet. As he watched, something brown and glowing began to circle the Asgardian, along with a hiss that reverberated deep in Peter’s bones.

“Loki—” he began, but the god was already moving.

Not away, however. As the inhabitants of the room surged to their feet in surprise and defense, Loki merely lifted his hands and tossed Peter the Stone and the list. He glanced down at the sparks beneath his feet and sighed, “not  _ again,  _ for Odin’s sake!”

And before Peter could so much as catch the falling objects, Loki had  _ fallen through the floor _ and disappeared. 

All that remained was a business card. 

* * *

 

The only reason that Hong Kong and it’s…  _ associated events  _ didn’t fill the top spot on Stephen’s nonsense list like they filled the next ten was that the first spot was reserved for a far more confusing phenomenon. At least he had  _ some  _ idea of an explanation when it came to Hong Kong—a rather good one, in fact. 

In honesty, Stephen didn’t have anything against the Avengers Compound, or the Avengers in general. He avoided their drama, if at all possible, but he appreciated what they did. When he was in a good mood, he might even respect a few of them.

But five weeks ago, Stephen had started dreaming. Ongoing, unusual dreams that lingered in his consciousness like a catchy song. Dreams that his memory latched onto in strange ways. Dreams that didn’t _ make any sense.  _

Because for five weeks, Stephen had dreamed about Tony Stark. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HE EMERGES!!!! Lol, I have been waiting so loooooooong... 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you all soon. :)


	47. Nothing to Hope For

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just really wanted more Stephen okay leave me be
> 
> **OC characters from other AU fics make cameos in completely unrelated, separate AU fics**

 

**Earth-199999:** **_February 2026_ **

 

There was a new Master of the New York Sanctum. 

Stephen thought she looked quite competent, armed with the Stave of Senses and watching him with a fiery gaze. She kept glancing over to where he sat, despite the hushed words of the Masters gathered around her, and he started counting the number of times they made cursed eye contact as something to do.

He’d never been at a sorcerer’s trial before. Stephen supposed that was a positive thing—no Mystic Artist had gone rogue in the time he’d worn the Eye—but now, sitting forward in a cold, hard chair with his hands bound behind him, he found he had no idea what to expect. 

The Cloak kept prodding at the dripping wires of magic, and Stephen kept telling it off. They were uncomfortable, sure, but at least they didn’t touch his fingers, stiff and aching from the chill. By restraining both arms, Stephen’s ability to direct dimensional energies was effectively staunched. The Cloak didn’t like it. Really, neither did Stephen, but he was willing to indulge it, seeing as his fate was being decided by the group in front of him.

The New York Master glanced at him again. Stephen met her gaze levelly, trying to read anything he could from the expression. 

He hoped he was reading wrong. 

Stephen only truly knew a few of these people. He only knew about three-fourths by name, and he could count on one hand those he’d held a conversation with. 

Then there was Wong. Who hadn’t even looked at him since they’d arrived in Kamar-Taj. 

He wondered what they were saying. He wondered who was arguing for him, who was arguing against—if they were even arguing at all. If they were just gathering the complicated explanation of what Stephen had done, all the laws he had splintered.  

“If they rule me wrong, guilty, whatever they want to call it,” Stephen murmured to the ruby collar at his shoulder, “what should we do?”

The Cloak stiffened. He felt its corner curl protectively around his wrist. 

“They may imprison me, but I doubt it. Casting me out of the Order is more likely—until Loki and crew bring the dimensions together. I won’t be able to use magic without turning from outcast to criminal.”

He tried to keep his voice even, rational, but a wobble of grief slurred the last few words. The Order was doing what needed to be done; he didn’t blame them. He had done what he knew was right, and they were to do the same. He would face his consequences. 

At least he’d have his Cloak. 

“Maybe we could… learn to make balloon animals,” Stephen continued with a grin. 

The Cloak slapped his shoulder in its imitation of a laugh. But it was weak, as weak as Stephen’s optimism. 

“Work… in a restaurant.” Then he cringed. “No, no, what if I ran into Christine or something. Or—”

Peter.

“Oh my God, Peter,” Stephen hissed. “I wonder if anyone told him where I went… I wonder if he kept coming.”

Two years… the kid would have graduated. And Morgan would be starting school. Stephen wondered how the recovery was going, the integration of the Dusted back into their now overpopulated society. 

For someone with all the time in the world, two years was certainly a while.

He’d left his phone in his chambers. Taking technology through the Tapestry wasn’t just pointless, it was dangerous—the memory of the device kept it grounded in its own time, especially if one had any chance of being contacted. 

Perhaps there were voicemails. After all this, perhaps he should figure out how to actually check them. 

“Peter’s probably the king of cribbage at this point. You and I haven’t played in weeks-turned-years.”

The Cloak shivered its affirmation. Slumping back a bit, Stephen sighed and tried to roll a bit of the soreness from his bound arms. 

The New York Master was looking at him again. 

He almost gave into the urge to sarcastically introduce himself, but bit it back at the last moment. Antagonizing these people was likely not the wisest of ideas, even if he very much would enjoy it. 

“Thanks for waiting for me, by the way,” he whispered to the garment on his shoulders when the woman looked away again. 

The Cloak bobbed. It’s silky fabric slithered over his collar, and Stephen leaned into its support for a moment. After this trial, he’d better be permitted a nap.

“Did you stay the whole time?” he wondered. “I can’t imagine… two years of nothing, rain, snow, shine…”

The Cloak bobbed again.

“Why am I not surprised,” Stephen sighed, though his chest was warm. “You’re a Gryffindor.”

The Coak puffed, pleased with the sentiment, and Stephen laughed under his breath.

“Have you even read those books?”

Offended, the Cloak flicked its hem in an obvious  _ ‘duh.’ _

“Right, yes, of course.” Stephen shifted on his chair. His hands knocked against the wood behind him, sending a twinge through his tied wrists, and he grimaced.

When he looked back up, the entirety of the group was watching him, not just the New York Master. There was something cold in a few of their gazes, something resided in others’, and Stephen sat up a little taller. 

“Stephen Strange,” one of the Masters began. Stephen had met him; powerful and ancient, Zhang defended the Hong Kong Sanctum. “You have violated the laws of our order, including our most essential. You have manipulated a world that was not yours to manipulate, on a scale so arrogant it has never before been attempted.”

_ Then how do you know it’s wrong? _

“In no time of crisis, by now outward pressure, you chose to break your oath and abandon your duties in our Order. Abandon us all.”

_ I chose to save you. _

The Master of the New York Sanctum stepped forward, sharp face and red hair flashing. “You betrayed us, risked our entire universe, for one man.”

Stephen lifted his chin, staring down at the prosecutors before him despite his position. “Not one man,” he said, uncaring of his interruption. 

There was a collective inhale—just a whisper really—but Stephen sensed it. He didn’t care to evaluate what it meant, what it might imply, didn’t care enough to hope, for there was nothing to hope for. Stephen wasn’t asking for forgiveness.

“I didn’t do this for one man. A man, a woman, an android, a prince, an alien. Tell me, have any of you been to New Asgard?”

No one reacted, not even to twitch, much less to nod.

“There’s holes there. Grief there, even still. Because seven years ago, hundreds of them were slaughtered by Thanos in his quest for the Space Stone. Hundreds that did not return. Hundreds that did not get our happy ending.”

Stephen thought of Thor, thought of the story he’d told of the Stones, thought of everything that had been lost before any of them had even realized the threat.

“There’s a planet up there,” Stephen continued, voice carrying through the hall, “called Xandar. It was once home to an intergalactic force dedicated to peace in the Andromeda Galaxy. Until 2018, it held the Power Stone.”

The eyes of the Masters flickered.

“Millions of Xandarians— _ people,  _ no matter what they may look like—lost their lives long ago. Xandar was  _ decimated.  _ Not just attacked, not just pillaged, ravaged— _ decimated.”  _ Stephen took a breath. “They’re a scavenging planet now. Those who are left live in ruin, every member of their government slaughtered in a selfless push to fight back. They did not get our happy ending either.

“And there’s a planet right here.” Stephen stomped a foot, the sound of his boot against the Earth like thunder in the great room. “A planet that’s ending maybe wasn’t quite as happy as we thought. How many committed suicide during those five years? How many came back from dust stranded—in the sky, in the sea? Patients halfway through surgeries? Inhabitants of buildings long since destroyed? How many fetuses? How many infants without their parents?”

Stephen closed his eyes. The glow of Time still shown in the darkness behind his eyelids; he didn’t think it would ever stop. 

“I chose this ending,” Stephen murmured, “because it was best. But that doesn’t mean it’s over. None of this was over. So I did what I had to do.”

There was silence for eighteen heartbeats. Each thrummed in Stephen’s mind, gave him strength to keep his head up as a dozen piercing gazes looked him over. 

Even Wong. 

Zhang was the first to speak. “I have heard these words before,” he said, “from a man just as gifted as the arts as you.”

And all of a sudden, Stephen knew exactly what was going to happen. 

Shoulders rolling forward, he slumped back into the chair in defeat. 

“When I trained Kaecilius, I had such hope. I believed in another generation of passionate sorcerers with the will to do what was right. Kae was talented, interested, determined, and I thought our Order might survive in this new age. With him to herald adaptation, and the Ancient One to hold our tradition, knowledge, and the majority of our power.”

“We all thought that,” murmured another Master. Stephen didn’t recognize her. 

“I thought the same of you, Stephen Strange.” Zhang stepped forward. “I saw you sacrifice so much for us and our world. We do realize what you’ve given, and we are grateful. You’ve given your life a thousand, a million times over. You were willing to ignore everything, anything, to save and protect.

“But now…” he shook his head. “Even when Kaecilius saw the Dark, he was earnest. Convicted. He assured me, even as he killed the novices in my care to escape with his chosen relic, that he was trying to save the world. The passion and talent never dissipated. It just twisted.”

Stephen shivered under the words. Not because they made him doubt, but because he  _ didn’t— _ he was so sure. So  _ sure.  _ What if…

“How long until we see the glyphs of power and death upon your brow? You have already begun to manipulate universes like marbles on a playing board. And maybe you are right, and we are wrong, but what if this is the day you failed? Who knows the danger you’ve thrust upon not just yourself, not just our Order, but the entire  _ universe.  _ What of those who may die?”

Stephen’s words met those in midair, clashing like steel on steel. “When did the theoretical become more important than the actual? When did those who might suffer become more important than those who did? I am stopping, have stopped, whole worlds from a grief they do not deserve. I can erase the terrible consequences of an event we couldn’t prevent—”

“It is not your place to erase!” That from the New York Master, eyes flashing. 

“Maura,” someone warned, but she ignored them.

“What of all we learned from Thanos? All this world experienced? Why should you decide how much it matters?”

“Thanos won’t be forgotten,” Stephen murmured. “But neither will he be remembered every time you walk down the street and see a mural, or glance at the empty house of a friend who didn’t make it through those five dark years. People will grow, change, learn—but they will also  _ live.  _ Don’t you understand? Can’t you  _ see—” _

“How long.” Zhang was stepping forward. “How long until we see those glyphs, Strange?”

“Perhaps you can justify these actions,” the New York Master, Maura, said. “But it is a hairsbreadth before you can’t anymore. Before novices have to die to fulfill a destiny only you can see. You were a student of the Ancient One, tempted herself by the Dark. Your power has only grown since you came into our ranks, and I should have seen—we all should have guessed—that it would be no sorcerer that destroyed you but yourself.”

A murmur around the table, one that sounded of agreement. 

“Do you have anything to say,” Zhang asked, “before we rule your fate?”

Stephen rolled his shoulders back, knowing the Cloak was straightening against him, curling over the back of the chair. He was still a sorcerer, still permitted this for as long as he could.

“I have spoken all I wished,” he affirmed. “I have nothing to say.”

Zhang nodded, but before he could step back into the ranks around him, another voice emerged. 

“I do.”

The Masters parted, surprised, around the voice like sparrows from a hawk. Wong stood, solid and immobile as always, in the center of their circle. And he was finally looking at Stephen. 

“We are not accusing Strange based on what he has done.” Wong’s low voice rolled through their group. “We are acting based on what he might do. So I offer my conviction on that account.

“Stephen Strange is a good man.” Wong met Stephen’s eyes. “I’ve taught him, I’ve learned from him. I’ve had takeout with him and tracked Mystic threats over coffee. He knows every one of our laws, each nuance and twist of the mistakes and successes of sorcerers that came before us. The only thing that matters more to him than our Order is the well-being of the world around him. Do any of you remember when it wasn’t? When the only one Strange cared about was himself?”

A few slow nods.

“He now sits before us because he was willing to die, to break his own convictions, for the sake of another—many others,” Wong rumbled, his piercing gaze snapping throughout the room. “He changed. Perhaps he has changed again, and perhaps it is for the worse.”

More nodding. Wong’s gaze finally circled back to Stephen’s, meeting his levelly. 

“But I don’t believe that. This man is good. This man is one of us. And this man is my friend.”

Wong smiled, light and subtle. 

Stephen was blinking back tears as he returned it. 

The silence that followed was bitter and putrescent, but Stephen hardly noticed nor cared. Wong forgave him. It changed nothing, not really but the knowledge that the librarian, his teacher and friend, did not repudiate him lifted some of the weight from Stephen’s chest. They could do anything they wanted to him—at least there was something for his confidence to cling to. 

“We will… discuss this further,” said Zhang after a long while. 

Stephen, resisting the urge to groan at the thought of more time with his shoulders twisted behind his skull, nodded and settled back to wait.

He didn’t know whether to be encouraged or discouraged by the time the dozen sorcerers took speaking in hushed tones. Long enough that Stephen could hear the bustle of Kamar-Taj and the city around it waking to the dawn. A few novices peeked their heads in, curious and wide-eyed at the sight of Stephen, before being shooed off by a sharp bark from one of the Masters. The New York Master had stopped stealing glances.  

Stephen and the Cloak waited, patient and resigned, as the conversation began to die. Stephen could almost smell it as agreement coalesced, as the decision line was crossed. He tried to pretend that the ache in his chest was from his shoulders being yanked.

It was slightly creepy, when they all turned to him as one. 

With a wave of Zhang’s hands, Stephen’s bindings fell away. He hissed in discomfort as his arms were suddenly flooded with the warm tingling of feeling and blood flow.

There wasn’t any dancing around, wasn’t any explanation; there’d been enough talking. “You are a valuable member of our Order,” Zhang said, “but not of our leadership. You are no longer a Sanctum protector. You are no longer a Master. You’re part of the Order but no longer a sorcerer, and your duties and overseement will reflect that.”

It was a momentous effort to keep the relief from Stephen’s face, the grin. He was staying in Kamar-Taj. They were letting him stay. He wouldn’t have to leave this place that had become his home—he could still belong here. 

Maura continued for the other Master.  “You will relinquish your sling-ring—”

Stephen was slipping it from his scarred fingers before the words had stopped echoing. He tossed it to Wong, who snatched it with more deftness than Stephen would have expected.

But Maura wasn’t finished. 

“—and your relic, before Orson details what your life will look like until we can trust you again.”

“What?” Stephen blurted.

The woman gestured to the man beside her, whom Stephen assumed was Orson. “What isn’t clear about this?”

“It’s perfectly clear. Too clear. Very much too clear.” Stephen’s eyes found Wong’s somewhat desperately, searching him out behind the Masters speaking. 

_ ‘I’m sorry,’  _ Wong mouthed. 

The Cloak was wrapping around Stephen’s hands, wildly, possessively. He was gripping it back as tightly as his shattered fingers allowed. 

“Your relic,” Zhang said, extending a hand. “Dangerous and powerful, it belongs in the New York Sanctum.”

“It’s not—” Stephen took a step back. Two. “It’s the Cloak. It belongs wherever it chooses.”

“It belongs with sorcerers.”

“I’m warning you,” Stephen began, raising both hands as Orson advanced toward him.

“You threaten me?” Orson paused, but only for a moment. Even Stephen was outnumbered. “When we’ve offered you a life here despite the seriousness of your offense?”

“You aren’t in danger from  _ me,  _ for the Vistanti’s sake!” Stephen had backed himself against the wall now, Cloak tight around him. 

“Relinquish your relic!” Zhang called one last time as Orson reached toward the ruby fabric that draped over Stephen’s shoulder. His fingers brushed it.

The proceeding events happened in a blink.

The Cloak knew precisely what was going on. And the Cloak was anything but alright with it. As the Master’s hand brushed its sentient fabric, the garment moved faster than a striking snake, whipping itself into the air and  _ slamming  _ into what it interpreted as an attacker. 

“Wait!” Stephen cried, but the words were lost to the flapping of fabric. 

Once, twice, the Cloak wrapped itself around Orson’s head, yanking him against the hardwood floor. Stephen had seen this before, and he was on his knees pulling at the Cloak before the man had let out his first shout. 

“Stop—” Stephen began. 

Orson’s struggling, prying fingers wrapped like a vice around Stephen’s knuckles. 

Misshapen bones ground, artificial supports warped, fingers crossed over each other like fork prongs tangling in a drawer. Stephen choked on a gasp of pain. 

And the Cloak shuddered, fury dropping its corners almost to its hems. Stephen yanked his hand from Orson’s grip as the Cloak tightened its own, and shouts began to fade into panicked wheezing. 

Stephen tried to pull at the fabric, but he couldn’t get his hands to hold it with even a whisper of the needed strength and—

The Cloak went limp in his grip.

For a moment, Stephen thought it had worked. For a moment, he thought his words might have registered to his comrade, his friend.

And then he felt the whisper of magic, saw Zhang with his hands raised. 

The Cloak did not so much as flutter as Orson pulled it from his head, gasping, hand rubbing his collarbone and throat. It pooled into a heap against Stephen’s knees, unresponsive.

“No.” Stephen didn’t mean to speak, but the word ripped as rough as sandpaper from his mouth.  _ “No!” _

He gathered the ruby fabric into his hands, trying to untangle the hems and find the collar, the clasps. Trying to feel it wrap around his wrists in protest about being manhandled. 

Nothing.

“What have you done?” he hissed, the full might of his power in his voice, uncaring of the fact that he’d been forbidden it.  _ “What have you done?” _

“Bound its power,” Zhang said. “What was imbued can be removed.”

_ No no no no no— _

“It’s temporary.” Wong had pushed to the front of the group, kneeling by Stephen—not close enough to touch, nor to speak without volume. “Half an hour at most.”

Fabric draped through his fingers, heavy and thick and lifeless. Stephen swallowed, and it tasted of sandpaper. 

“Reverse it,” he hissed. “The Cloak didn’t do—it was protecting me, it would never have—”

“Strange.”

Stephen stopped talking, but he didn’t look up from the cloth in his hands. 

“Do you truly want to fight this battle?” Zhang’s voice was soft, understanding. 

Stephen wanted to curse him. “Reverse it.”

“Even you are outnumbered here. No sling-ring, no allies.”

Stephen looked up, still on his knees before the Masters. Maura extended a hand. It was close enough to reach, and Stephen couldn’t remember when she’d advanced toward him.

“You don’t want to fight,” Zhang continued, stepping up beside the woman. “And you can’t win.”

“Don’t.” Wong spoke quietly, with far too much resignation. “Just… don’t.”

“None of us want to fight you. None of us want to hurt or banish or imprison you. But we will protect our Order at any cost, just as you will.”

Stephen hoped his glare contained every ounce of the wrath that churned in his gut. He hoped these people could see that his hands shook from so much more than their scars as he stood, his Cloak in his arms. He hoped they could hear the farewell they’d forced from him when he draped his relic over Maura’s wrist. 

He hoped she knew he hated her as she brushed a hand over the fabric, marveling. 

“At your service,” Stephen spat. He spread his arms, a threat, a dare. 

A surrender. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'M SORRY OKAY--


	48. Distal Phalanges

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“What just happened?” Tony demanded, surging forward on the bed. His hip twinged, but the movement didn’t reach his injured shoulder. 

Six voices clamored to answer, but the somewhat panicked yelp of Peter Parker rose over them. “The floor—it just—there were these brown sparks and then—the floor ate Loki!”

Tony might have laughed if the kid hadn’t been so pale. Carefully, favoring his healing side, Tony swung his legs over the edge of the bed. Pepper’s hand tightened in warning on his knee. 

Across the room, Peter was kneeling, scooping something from the floor beneath where Loki’s chair had been. It looked like a slip of paper. Perfectly rectangular, Tony thought it looked the regulation size of a business card, cream in color and shining with golden letters. He couldn’t read them from where he sat, so Tony eased himself to the edge of the bed. 

_ “‘177A Bleecker Street’,”  _ Peter read, frowning. “What…”

“It’s in Greenwich Village,” Vision contributed, standing and moving to Peter’s shoulder. FRIDAY confirmed the android’s words.

“A street address.” Tony frowned. His fingers played across the bandage of his hip. It was secure, painless, though stiff. The nanotech working within would continue to hold the wound even with movement, keeping stitches from pulling free… 

“Don’t even think about it,” Pepper hissed. 

Tony glanced at her. “Someone just stole the kid’s Asgardian.”

“You can’t  _ get up!”  _ May was standing now, too, lingering a bit awkwardly between Peter and Tony. 

“I’ve got things to do!” Tony protested. “Apparently.”

“Mr. Stark—”

Tony raised an eyebrow at the kid. There was conflict on his face; his hands were shaking around the tightly-clutched business card, terrified of the confusion of previous events, but he watched Tony with concern all the same.

“I’m fine.” Tony pushed himself to his feet before anyone could stop him. 

There was a clamor of protest, but it was too late; Tony experimentally shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was sore, but nothing truly  _ hurt. _

“See?” He spread his arms, glancing at his glowering CEO.

_ “Anthony Edward Stark,  _ lay the  _ fuck  _ down!”

Tony recoiled dramatically, gesturing at the room around them. “Um, excuse you, there are children present.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. 

“Not you, though you are technically a child.” Tony took a careful step forward. No tearing, no agony, nothing but the shifting of bandages and the slight tickle of expanding nanotech. “FRIDAY, remember only to use that word when it’s appropriate.”

“Yes, boss.” The lights darkened.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me!” Tony scowled at the ceiling. 

Vision chuckled, the gem in his head pulsing. 

The Stone. 

Right. Shit. They were going to need to do something about that. He could see thought turning behind the android’s eyes, and knew Vision was already considering, already analyzing. Maybe he could leave that problem to Vision, Tony thought hesitantly. At least until they dealt with the latest Loki problem. Jar—Vision could handle it.

“Happy, I’m driving,” Tony said, moving toward the center of the room.

“No, no, no,” Rhodey sighed, standing and setting a hand on Tony’s chest. “You are not going into battle.”

“Who says its battle?” Tony asked. “The Asgardian didn’t look very upset.”

“Maybe it's the wizard.” Peter’s voice was quiet, as though he hadn’t meant to speak aloud. 

“What?” Tony looked at him. 

“Oh, I—” Peter took a breath. “I just thought it could be the wizard. It looked like magic, right? But nothing like Loki’s usual magic.”

Tony sighed. “I’ll never get used to the fact that you know what Loki’s  _ ‘usual magic’  _ looks like.” 

Peter shrugged. “I’ve gone to school with him as a snake in my shirt, so.”

May made a choking noise. 

Pinching the bridge of his nose, Tony used his other hand to move Rhodey’s wrist away from his chest. “Okay, fine, whatever, I’m going to ignore that for the sake of my sanity.”

Peter smiled a bit, looking at his feet, and Tony felt a bit better.

“Let me see that,” Tony said, holding out a hand for the business card.

Peter flipped it to him, and Tony spread it on his palm. One of the corners was bent from Peter’s grip. Embossed gold letters blinked up at Tony, simple and elegant on off-white background, and Tony nodded and tucked it into his pocket.

“I don’t think this is a threat,” Rhodey said. “I think it’s a summons. Which is almost more dangerous.”

“We need—” Peter took a breath. In front of him, Peter’s fingers were flying across an invisible keyboard, mapping something out in that quick, shining mind. “If it’s a good thing, we need to go; Loki said the doctor guy was the answer to practically everything. And if it’s a bad thing, we _have_ to go. Loki—we can’t just leave him.”  
“Trap?” Pepper said pointedly. 

“There was a trap last week,” Tony hummed. “This one can’t be one too.”

Rolling her eyes, Pepper moved to stand next to them, effectively recreating the circle from before, just smaller. “I don’t feel like that’s sound reasoning for action, Tony.”

Tony shrugged. “I’m inclined to believe the kid.”

Peter looked up in something far too close to surprise. Tony held in a frown. 

“To Greenwich?” Peter asked hesitantly.

“Don’t encourage this, Peter,” May yelped, waving a hand at Tony. “You were  _ dying  _ the last anyone told me!” 

“And now I’m not! Nanobots are shockingly effective when it comes to flesh wounds.” Tony limped a few more experimental steps forward. “I’m compromising by letting Happy drive and not insisting on taking the suit.”

Pepper tensed next to him, and Tony figured that last would get him killed. Car it was. 

“Lost: One Snakey Asgardian,” Tony breathed under his breath. 

Peter huffed a laugh, offering a supporting hand as Tony began to move a bit faster through the room. His stiff muscles complained, and his subconscious kept most of his weight on his uninjured side, but it was satisfactorily easy. 

“If you die,” Pepper warned, “I get the right to organize your funeral.”

“Done,” Tony said.

“And jurisdiction over what is done with your lab.”

“You drive a hard bargain, woman.”

Pepper crossed her arms. “And the last cheeseburger I know you’re hiding in the West Kitchen.”

Tony forced the word out through painfully resistant teeth. “Fine.”

“Who’s going then?” Rhodes asked, amusement in his tone.

Tony, resisting the urge to flip him off, said, “me, the kid, you, Vision.”

“I think,” Vision interrupted, “that it might be wise for me to remain.” 

Tony glanced at him questioningly, and found Vision tapping the Stone in his forehead.

“There is more research I need to conduct when it comes to this entity in my head,” the android explained. “Now that we know there are enemies in pursuit of it, adding the factor of its power to an already mysterious scenario may not be the wisest choice.”

Tony frowned. “We may need you.”

“I will be ready if that is true,” Vision agreed. “But my intuition feels young Mr. Parker may be on to an explanation, and that Colonel Rhodes is correct. It was not I who was summoned, but you.”

Tony had to admit he agreed; his gut did not say threat, not enough to warrant a suit, despite the ease at which Loki had been taken. Even ‘taken’ seemed the wrong word. Tony was more likely to say ‘detained’ or ‘inconveniently interrupted’ from the god’s demeanor at the time. 

Peter, though, was nervous, and Tony didn’t blame him. He was a teenager with the universe relying on him, and that did things to you, though Peter may not realize it consciously. The faster they figured this out, the better.

Speaking of.

“FRIDAY,” Tony said, meeting Peter’s eye. “Could you direct Mr. Parker to my lab?”

Peter’s brow furrowed in confusion, but he didn’t interrupt, and Tony didn’t stop.

“I do believe there's something that belongs to him.” Tony winked. “Though I should probably say Spider-Man.”

Peter smiled. 

* * *

 

Stephen, sitting comfortably on the bottom of the staircase that led out of the Sanctum great hall, tapped his foot to the beat of the song of the day. He could safely say he was disappointed. In himself, mostly—Loki of Asgard was a recorded Mystical threat, and it had taken Stephen two weeks to find and detain him.

He wasn’t exactly sure what to do with the god now that he had him. Waiting seemed the most logical of options, seeing as he’d snatched Loki from a hospital room in the Avengers Compound—the virtual tour of the place was quite detailed, to his luck. It shouldn’t be long until his card was found. 

He just hoped no one made a mess of his newly repaired Sanctum when they arrived. They could always just knock. 

“Those are the distal phalanges,” he said as the Cloak wrapped a curious corner around the outstretched fingertips of one hand. He wasn’t wearing his bandages today; they didn’t ache too badly. “One of the three bones classified within the fingers.”

The Cloak quirked, and Stephen felt it move over his shoulders. The corner traveled down to the center of his scarred fingers and tapped, twice.

“That’s an intermediate phalange.” Stephen smiled slightly. “And the next one down is the proximal.” 

The Cloak felt around his knuckles, exploring their bumps and grooves with innocent interest. 

“Most people’s aren't so rough,” Stephen explained. “The nobs you feel aren’t bone—they're the pins that stitch my tendons back together.”

A little gentler now, the Cloak prodded at his palm and the back of his hand. 

“Metacarpals,” Stephen said. “Hamate, triquetral, pisiform. Scaphoid,” he continued as the Cloak wrapped around his wrist. It paused when it found the edge of his thumb and slowly brushed the edge of it. 

Stephen watched it, amused, as it wrapped around the tip of the thumb and bent it. The Cloak tapped the two sections, then tapped the three of his index finger and fluttered curiously. 

“I know, the thumb only has two phalanges,” Stephen said. “Distal and proximal. No intermediate.”

The Cloak, bobbing in affirmation, flipped his hand over. His scars gleamed pale and spidery in the light. They were slightly offset from the lines of his bones, and they cut through his veins like a child’s stick dragged through the sand of a playground. 

“Those don’t have names,” he said softly as the Cloak poked at them. “They’re just me.”

He was strangely thankful, now, for those physical scars. The others weren’t nearly so clean. 

In the silence that followed, he wondered vaguely how Loki was getting on. Asgardian sorcery was of a different nature than the Mystic Arts, so he doubted the god could manipulate the mirror dimension he was currently trapped in. 

The Sanctum wards crooned their warning notes in Stephen’s mind, and he perked up. Looked like the waiting game was over. 

He straightened up, slightly unsteady on the stairwell, and the Cloak adjusted on his shoulders. It twitched its clasps, fussing with them until they were at the best angle to catch the light. Stephen swallowed a laugh. 

The Cloak felt it, and puffed irritably. Stephen was quick to assure, “no, no, I appreciate it! You’re the only reason I ever look presentable when we have guests.”

Appeased, the Cloak settled back against him and curled its corners around his ankles, giving itself a slight flare. 

“Shall I conjure us some wind to tousle the hair while you flutter?” Stephen asked, his face perfectly straight.

The Cloak slapped him, and Stephen couldn’t contain his laugh this time.

Flipping inside-out, the Cloak reached and began a vigorous tousling of Stephen’s hair consisting of frantic flapping about. Stephen yelped, trying to duck out of its hold. His relic was relentless, however, and pursued him easily, buffeting his ears and eyes as it attacked what remained of his hairstyle. 

He was saved by a loud knock at the Sanctum double doors, somehow both reluctant and authoritative. It wasn’t so much a knock as it was a  _ demand,  _ a straight-up order for answers.

From a knock like that, Stephen knew precisely who was on the other side of the door.

The Cloak and he froze like children caught in the act, quickly straightening up and rearranging themselves. Frantically, Stephen tried to tame his hair. It ran through his fingers in spikey black and silver waves, completely wild, but Stephen didn’t dare resort to magic in case the Cloak tattled on him. So he did the best he could, at least smoothing it from his eyes, and crossed the great hall to door. 

There was quite a party on the other side. 

Stephen recognized Colonel Rhodes, who’s quick assessment of Stephen’s person as soon as the door cracked open was quick and efficient. Returning the once over, Stephen found the man only minimally armed. 

There was also a boy, wearing a very corny, pun-adorned T-shirt that Stephen found genuinely amusing. But the look the kid gave him was not at all civilian, nor was it in any way ignorant. From the way the kid’s weight was shifted into the balls of his feet, hands curled at his sides but shoulders relaxed, Stephen knew he was ready to fight.  

And then, of course, standing directly in the center of his view, was Tony Stark. 

Stephen’s diagnosing eye took in the favored right arm, the weight cascading to the left leg, and made a deduction. He didn’t voice it, however, as Stark’s eyes narrowed slightly. 

Stephen forced himself to meet the calculating gaze. The Cloak flared slightly at his collar and ankles, and the boy let out a quiet exclamation. 

Stark didn’t notice. Instead, his eyes were widening with realization and… recognition?

“It’s you!” he blurted.

Stephen’s eyebrow rose into non-existence. “Have we met?”

“I had a dream about—” Stark cut himself off, openly staring now. 

Stephen stared back.

Then he gripped his surprise with powerful hands and shoved it down, finding his apathy from wherever it had fled to. He stepped back, Cloak brushing aside to beckon the Avengers forward.

“You’d better come in.”

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *vibrating*
> 
> THEY MET THEY MET THEY MET THEY MET THEY MET THEY MET--


	49. Tier of the Physical

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You didn't think this was gonna go WELL, did you? XD

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Tony hadn’t thought about that dream for weeks. He hadn’t even realized he still recalled it. 

But this was unmistakably, undeniably the man from his vision, and now, as he crossed the threshold of this somewhat sinister building, it was all he could think about. Details evaded his grasp—the setting of the dream, the logic. He couldn’t even remember if it  _ had  _ been logical. There was one flash of clarity through the entire thing, as one might remember the sound of a mother’s yell in an early memory, of this man’s voice.

_ “‘It’s fucked, if we’re being technical.’” _

The wizard was in his head.  _ In his head,  _ and Tony was not panicking, he  _ was not,  _ because this wasn’t Loki or Wanda and it wasn’t red and it wasn’t his worst nightmare. 

In his head.

_ Get out.  _ He was screaming it silently, even as he cast his eyes around the room he’d stepped into. Involuntarily, easily, he and Rhodey and Peter formed a loose circle to face each edge. Tony was left square to the wizard, stepping into the light that pooled from the domed window above them.

_ Get. Out! _

The man didn’t react. Tony clamped down on his snarl.

“Where’s Loki?” Peter demanded. His voice echoed in the dusty room. 

Brushing untamed hair out of his eyes, the wizard stepped onto the swooping staircase that curled up to the balcony of the great hall. “He’s fine,” was his reply. 

“What have you done with him? Why did you take him?” 

Tony held up a hand to keep the boy from advancing. In the corner of his eye, he could see Peter’s hands twitching against the buttons of the web shooters. 

“He’s currently in a tier of the mirror dimension that allows me to get a reading on his specific dimensional signature. And he’s a threat to this realm and is my therefore my responsibility to deal with.”

Peter took a step forward, and Tony shifted his weight onto the balls of his feet, really hoping he wasn’t going to have to break his promise to Pepper. 

_ “Deal with him how?” _

The wizard didn’t look the least bit intimidated. He leaned against the banister of the stairwell, fiddling with something on his fingers.

“We’ll need him back,” Tony said as amicably as he could. 

“You do realize,” the man drawled, “that said Asgardian is likely manipulating you for ulterior ends?”

Tony heard Peter’s frustrated inhale. “He’s  _ not.  _ Last I checked, that’s what  _ you _ were doing, wizard.”

A flicker of what might have been confusion twitched across the wizard’s amused expression. He smoothed it away with unsettling ease.

_ In my head.  _ Tony took a breath, his hands fisting at his sides.

“Me?” the man inquired, moving down as step on the staircase. “I’ve never actually met you.” He pivoted, pointing a finger in Tony’s direction, then craning to indicate Rhodey as well. “You two, either. Though I know slightly more about you.”

_ In my head. _

“Congratulations on the move, by the way. Nice place.”

Peter wasn’t having a word of this, and Tony could only smile somewhat proudly as he practically hissed at the wizard. 

“Bring my friend back. Now.”

One of his eyebrows raised, but the wizard sighed and moved away from the banister. “If you insist,” he muttered, lifting his hands into the air. “And it’s Strange, if you please.”

Tony couldn’t stop himself from moving back, moving away, as a swirl of chestnut sparks erupted in the air before them. The trailing edges met with the second circle of the wizard’s hands, and a noise burst into the room around them.

The noise grew louder until Loki, hollering dramatically, pinwheeled out of the ceiling gateway and crashed  to the hardwood floor. 

There was a long pause, broken only by Strange as he casually snapped the portal shut. Tony tried not to shiver. 

Then Loki was on his feet, brushing his hair out of his face. He faced their group of three first. 

“Took you long enough,” he commented.

Before the words had stopped ringing, he spun on his heel and  _ stalked  _ toward the wizard, climbing onto the low steps before the man. Loki was an inch or two shorter. His mouth twisted into a snarl. 

Then, with a resounding  _ smack,  _ he punched Strange in the face. 

With a yelp that was more of shock than of pain, the wizard stumbled back against the banister. His clothing, on the other hand, moved like a ribbon of crimson lightning.

Between one blink and the next, Loki was pressed to the far stair edge, forced to his knees by the crushing hold of what had been Strange’s cape. The fabric crept around Loki’s neck, forcing him back until his skull pressed against the wood of the railing. 

“Loki!” Peter cried, hand raising. Tony reached for his wrist and the watch that encircled it, fingers brushing the signal for his suit. 

Strange was on his feet again, and Peter was releasing his webbing; three quick spatters buffeted the fabric coiling around Loki. They did nothing.

“Stop!” the wizard snapped, voice slicing through the room. It wasn’t directed at Peter, though. 

The Cloak paused, twisting and seeming to look back at its master.

Strange, working his jaw and licking blood off a split lip, nodded to the thing. “Don’t,” he continued. “He’s fine. Let him explain.”

Giving one last smack to Loki’s ear, the cape uncurled and dropped him to the floor like a sack of potatoes. Loki braced himself against the stairs, breathing ragged as he coughed. 

Peter raced up to him, and Tony moved back to stand between him and Rhodey to give the latter a clearer shot at Strange should the need present itself. 

“Nice right hook,” Strange observed. 

Loki spat at him.

“Really, there’s no need for that.” The wizard frowned, and his possessed clothing settled back around his shoulders protectively. 

“There’s  _ every  _ need for that,” Loki growled, accepting Peter’s hand to stumble to his feet. “This is your fault.”

“Technically it was the Cloak—”

“No, everything.  _ All this.”  _ Loki gestured to his form, to the air around them with an almost feral intensity. “It was you.  _ You.” _

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Do you ever go by the name Doctor Strange?” Tony said, seeking confirmation.

Strange raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s the only name I go by. I do believe I introduced myself.”

“Wait,” Rhodes raised a hand. “You’re name is… Doctor Strange?”

Strange’s face flattened in the emotionless expression of someone who’d been through this many, many times. “Doctor Stephen Strange, if you please.”

Tony swung his head to raise a pointed eyebrow at Peter.

“How was I supposed to know that was his real name?” the boy squeaked.

“Wait,  _ what?” _

“Abbreviated version,” Tony said, glancing back at the slightly bloody wizard, “future you sent Loki into the past to split the dimension, which we’re all now trapped in as we try to stop some great battle that you from the future lost from happening in the first place.”

Both Strange’s eyebrows leapt off his face. “Excuse me?”

“You told said Asgardian to find you for more explanation, but he couldn’t because the only name you gave was ‘Doctor Strange.’”

“That’s… my name,” Strange faltered. Then he turned to Loki, pointing a shaking hand in his direction. He didn’t seem threatened anywhere else in his manner, though—just the twitching of those fingers. Tony frowned.

“You’ve been wandering about New York, causing havoc for  _ five weeks,”  _ Strange said slowly, “because you… didn’t believe my name was Doctor Strange.”

Tony could feel Peter blushing from here.

“I looked you up? But you didn’t… all that came up was a neurosurgeon.”

“That’s—” Strange was blinking, a bit of a grin fluttering over his sharp features. “That’s me. Before.”

Loki dropped his head into one hand, splaying his fingers across the hollow of his eye in utter disbelief. Tony couldn’t help but smirk; five minutes of conversation with the wizard and Loki already looked like he wanted to shoot himself. “Are you  _ kidding  _ me?” the Asgardian demanded. 

“Nope.” 

“For  _ Odin’s  _ sake! Stab me, Peter, then stab yourself—such stupidity should not be allowed to frequent this Earth.”

Tony raised an eyebrow.

Peter glanced at him, face twisted into a gasping sort of frown as he tried desperately to keep in a laugh. Tony just smiled.

Then, with a blink, the area around them had changed, open space replaced by bookshelves, stairs replaced by a small strip of windows, polished floor replaced by scuffed and worn beams. Tony stumbled.

He blinked, again and again, but the new room remained, and he didn’t know  _ why,  _ he didn’t know  _ where— _ how did he get out? Get back? Get home? All he could see through those windows was grey sky and all that stayed consistent was the people around him.

The dark shadows of the room had stars glowing within them. 

Tony’s eyes widened. He took a step back. Another. Another. His hip twinged, then ached, but Tony hardly noticed. 

And then Rhodey’s hand was on his shoulder, securing him, grounding him. Tony heard his voice, and the words became clear with an unnerving delay. 

“Tones,” his friend said. “It’s alright. It was just Strange.”

He shouldn’t know Strange, shouldn’t recognize him. But he did.

_ GET OUT OF MY HEAD! _

This time, the wizard did look at him. Calculating blue-grey eyes flicked over his form, analyzing, concluding, diagnosing. 

“Short range teleport,” Strange said. “Limited exclusively within the Sanctums.”

“Fantastic.” Tony found his voice, and hoped his face wasn’t too pale. “And why the  _ hell  _ was it necessary?”

Strange shrugged.

Tony thought he might take a chance with that Cloak and punch the man as well.

“You were looking for me, then,” Strange said, glancing at Peter and Loki. Well, Loki—Peter had moved to linger beside Tony. 

When had that happened?

“Indeed,” Loki said. “We require your assistance, your explanation, and your power.”

The wizard’s expression didn’t change. It was unnerving. Everything about him, about  _ this,  _ was unnerving, and Tony did not want it poking around at his subconscious. Nothing should be doing that, and especially not this.

“Take a seat,” the wizard said. His hands lifted, then paused. For a moment, Tony thought Strange might have glanced at him.

With a flourish, four chairs had materialized behind each of them, and Strange was stalking behind the table to the single piece of furniture tucked beneath it.

Peter, who’d been doing a remarkably good job staying quiet from what Tony knew of him, gasped. “How did you do that?”

Strange paused where he was pulling out his own chair, hand still curled around its head. “Simple conjuring. It’s not hard.”

“Why didn’t you conjure yourself one?” Peter sat hesitantly, as though he expected his chair to disappear at any time.

“Because I like this one.” With a slight grating noise, the wizard pulled out his seat and slipped into it.

Realizing he was the last one still on his feet at this point, Tony slumped backward and rocked onto the back legs of the wooden stool. It was sturdy—and identical to the one Rhodey was perched upon, down to the grain of the wood.

“And why didn’t you conjure it, too?”

Strange meshed his fingers, dropping those shaking hands into his lap and out of sight. “Conjuring and summoning are very different things,” he said. “Conjuring is shifting a section of the dimension up in energy level so it joins the tier of the physical—in this case, a chair. Summoning is bringing an already existing object to you, and is only possible with things with extremely potent auras.”

Loki muttered something beside Tony, which he couldn’t make out. 

“So you just poofed our chairs out of—”

Strange cut the boy off. “Weren’t you angry at me?”

_ Oh boy.  _ Tony leaned forward and cupped his chin in his hand, wondering how this would play out.   

“What?” Peter frowned.

“You were threatening me over this idiot—” Strange gestured to Loki, who scowled— “and giving me  _ impressive  _ angry-bunny eyes.”

“Well, yeah, but you don’t seem so bad.”

Everyone else in the room—including Strange—raised varying numbers of eyebrows.

“I mean,” Peter said, completely oblivious to the disbelief in the atmosphere, “you’ve got a cool name and cool powers and a cool cape even if it did try to strangle Loki—”

“Hey!”

“—‘cause I think it was just protecting you and I guess I can forgive it for that. I mean, if anyone punched Mr. Stark in the face randomly I’d try to strangle them too.”

Tony whipped his gaze to the kid, brow furrowing. “What?”

Peter shrugged, giving Tony a set of finger guns. Loki looked weirdly smug, and Rhodey just laughed.

“Better avoid being punched in the face then,” Tony murmured, feeling just a bit flattered. 

Loki sat up, clearing his throat pointedly.“Getting back to the  _ point _ , we, unfortunately, need this wizard.”

“The preferred term is ‘sorcerer’, or ‘Master of the Mystic Arts’ if I’m feeling haughty,” Strange drawled, and though he was smiling slightly there was no amusement or inflection in the words. It was like there was a barricade around his form, something built so impenetrably that he wasn’t just hiding emotion; Tony wondered if there was anything there at all. If anything in this massive universe would so much as phase that man.

“Whatever.” Loki waved a dismissive hand. “What do you know about dimensional merging?”

Strange leaned forward. “Combining separate universes? Completely impossible.”

Not acknowledging the wizard’s words, Loki turned to Peter. “Did you bring the Stone?”

“Yeah, uh, yeah,” Peter said, reaching into his pocket. He left the list inside; Tony hear the paper crinkle.

Hand on his knee, Peter uncurled his fingers to release the emerald shine of the Time Stone.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephen: *exists*  
> Peter: (ง'̀-'́)ง  
> -five seconds later-  
> Stephen: *exists*  
> Peter: Yes hello everyone this is my new baby wizard friend his name is Strange and don't worry if you don't know what he's doing or can't understand what he's saying we support him because he's just as much of a dumbass as the rest of us.


	50. Dreams of My Own

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Does this count as an early chapter? IT'S STILL THE 9TH WHERE I AM EARLY 50TH CHAPTER FOR ALL OF YOU YOU'RE WELCOME
> 
> XD enjoy.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Stephen was standing before he’d realized. 

“Where did you get that.” His voice was flat, and the statement was less a question than an order.

Stark leaned in, seemingly involuntarily. His eyes reflected the splinters of mint light, jaw bathed sharply in the glow. There was an almost accusatory distrust in his gaze as it turned to Stephen, one that had been present since he stepped into the Sanctum. Now, by the Time Stone’s caress, Stark looked too much like another entity with glowing eyes and a piercing frown. 

Stephen knew he’d frozen. He knew he’d yet to blink. It took all of that concentration to keep the Words off his tongue.

He had half a mind to portal to Kamar-Taj, to demand backup, to force Wong to let him into the Eye’s chamber so he could see that it was there, see that this couldn’t be—it  _ couldn’t be— _

But he’d know that glow anywhere. He’d know the Stone’s boldness, know its power, know  _ it,  _ anywhere. 

_ “Where?”  _ Stephen demanded again, caught between the need to run and the need to advance.

“You gave it to me,” Loki snapped. He watched Stephen intently, eyes narrowed.

“I am  _ certain  _ I did not.” Voice flat, guarded, Stephen forced his body to move, to skirt the edge of the table and approach the glow of the Stone.

“Not  _ you  _ you,” Peter clarified without clarifying anything at all. 

“Ah, yes, that makes  _ so  _ much sense.” Stephen’s sarcasm flicked from his tongue with sharp, lethal edges. 

“You from the future in a different dimension.” Colonel Rhodes sounded tired as he spoke, and with the ridiculousness of that statement, Stephen didn’t blame him. 

The Cloak wrapped around his shaking hands as Stephen went to lift the Stone, covering his fingers to keep the worst of the power’s intensity from overwhelming him. As the aura of Time rippled over him, though, Stephen had no choice but to believe the Colonel’s words.

Because this was not his Time Stone.

His Stone felt like the sharpened edge of a dagger, like the point just before water began to boil. It felt like blinding light and the warmth that flooded through a limb as it regained blood flow. It felt like the pulse of a heartbeat and tick of a metronome, like chess pieces sliding across their board. The one in his hand felt  _ wrong.  _ Time was still there, power was still there, but Stephen felt it reaching through their reality instead of pooling inside it. 

He dropped the Stone like a burning coal. 

Stark stiffened as the  _ clink  _ of its connection rang through the library, but relaxed after nothing exploded. Wiping his hand on his tunic as though he could soothe the tingle of the erroneousness from his palm, Stephen whirled to Loki.

“Explain,” he ordered. “Now.”

It was Peter who answered as he craned over the edge of his chair to scoop the Time Stone from where it had landed. “This Stone comes from another universe.”

“Then what’s it doing here?” 

Loki scowled. “It was my ticket here, and our ticket back, after our quest is complete.”

“Quest?  _ Our?”  _ Stephen tapped the next tier of this universe and stepped across the room in a single stride, sliding back into his chair.

“You sent me here, with a Stone, to save the world and then merge the alternate universe I’ve created by my meddling with the broken one we all come from.”

Stephen stared, face immobile.

“That is impossible,” he finally drawled, “on  _ so many levels.  _ Not least of which being that it’s against every law of the Mystic Artists to just  _ give up  _ the Eye—Stone. I am to protect it with my life.”

“Well, tell that to you from the future, apparently,” Stark said. He leaned back in his chair, propping crossed legs on the table before him. Stephen rolled his eyes.

“I wouldn’t just…” Stephen shook his head. “Not for anything.”

“Not even to save the world?” Peter asked, leaning forward to brace his elbows on his knees. He tossed the Stone in one hand, catching it deftly. 

Opting not to answer, Stephen sat back in his own chair and let his eyes track the movements of the unshielded Stone. He resisted the urge to rub his chest where the phantom weight of the Eye was resting.

“What did I say to you?” he asked levelly, turning to Loki. “What  _ exactly  _ did I say?”

“You wouldn’t stop talking, actually.” Loki had materialized his dagger and was running it beneath each of his fingernails. “You showed up when  _ my people were dying  _ beneath spear points and magic and forced me to come here. You gave me an Infinity Stone when Thanos was only meters away and told me to save the world.”

“Thanos?” Stephen crossed his legs, fingers tapping on his knees.

“The alien that you apparently lost the fight against.” Loki shrugged. 

“Giving you the Stone in the past wouldn’t  _ do  _ anything,” Stephen mused. “It’d split the timeline and save a different universe while dooming the original.”

“That’s what I said,” Loki agreed. “But you spoke of using the power of the Infinity Stones to combine those two universes once the split one had been saved.”

Stephen barked a laugh. “I already told you, dimensional merging is impossible. Even with all six Stones, there’d be no way to… to  _ squish  _ two realities into one! Do you even  _ hear  _ yourself? The timelines wouldn’t be parallel, astral planes wouldn’t be shared—there’d be no way for the multiversal energy to mix when it originates from somewhere completely different!”

_ “Also what I said!”  _ Loki exclaimed. 

Stark was watching the exchange like a tennis match, eyes flickering calculatingly between the two of them. Stone in hand, the kid seemed to be almost vibrating with confusion and anticipation. And Colonel Rhodes just looked done. 

“You said, though, that these two timestreams were bonded.” Stephen could hear the artificial calmness in Loki’s voice, but he could see his knuckles whiten against the handles of the dagger. 

Stephen reached toward the multiversal energies, just in case he’d have to conjure his shields in short notice. 

“Bonded… timestreams.” Stephen shook his head. 

“If you say ‘impossible’ again, I’m going to punch you,” Stark contributed.

Stephen looked at him, expression empty. 

“The Time Stone. This Stone isn’t from this universe.” Loki held out his hand, and Peter rolled the stone into his fingers. Stephen saw the boy shiver as the aura passed out of his body. “It’s from the original universe, but I was forced to split the timeline and trap both myself and it here.”

And suddenly, Stephen was on his feet, mind revving from confusion to snapping, perfect understanding in a millisecond. 

“It  _ originates from your universe,”  _ he breathed. “It—shit. Its power is drawn from and released from the dimension where you’re from, and because it’s here, our world is also linked— _ chained— _ to yours.”

He paced, striding over to the window, inwardly gesticulating. The Cloak lifted from his shoulders as he nodded to it, zipping into the library to retrieve what he needed. 

“You got here about five weeks ago,” Stephen said, whirling to Loki. “The timeline split at that point. That’s when magic became sick, because we’re releasing it into the  _ wrong universe.  _ The energy of our timeline is bonded to the energy of yours, and everyone in this world can feel it.  _ Everyone.” _

“We don’t belong here,” Peter murmured.

“Exactly.” Stephen was half excited, half terrified. “We should be our own dimension, spinning freely through our own facet of the 4D multiverse, but we aren’t. We’re being artificially forced into dimensional parallelity.”

Rhodes was raising an eyebrow at him. “Did you figure all that out just now.”

Thrown off slightly, Stephen glared. “Stephen Strange, legally classified genius,  _ at your service.” _

The Colonel’s overwhelmed expression just grew more amused. “It seems I’m drastically outnumbered.”

“Three geniuses, two wizards—”

“Sorcerers,” Stephen and Loki said simultaneously.

Stark ignored them, “three idiots in suits and a floating… cape, apparently. Yeah, sorry Rhodey, you’ve got competition.”

“Wait, who’s the third genius?” Peter asked, raising his hand.

Everyone looked at him.

“Oh.” Peter blushed. “Uh, thanks, I guess.”

Stark rolled his eyes, but his smile was fond. Stephen’s number of questions increased by one. 

The Cloak zipped back toward the table from the labyrinth of library shelves, a few books propped tightly between its folds. It hovered before Stephen, slapping Stark as it went—likely for that jest about capes.

“Thanks,” Stephen told it. “On time travel and dimensional binding?”

The Cloak raised just one hem, shrugging apologetically. Just the first then. Stephen had doubted there’d be any practical descriptions of the latter anyway.

“Ah. Well, no matter,” he told his relic. “I think I might need the _ Astronomia Nova  _ too, if you wanted to grab that.”

The Cloak nodded, zipping off again. Stephen waved jokingly, and it did the same. 

He didn’t realize he was smiling slightly until he turned back to the four intruders and it slipped off his face. 

“What?” he said, just daring anyone to make a comment.

But Peter just proclaimed with a sigh of enthusiasm, “I. Love. Your. Cape.”

“It’s a Cloak, actually,” Stephen corrected.

“Cloak,” the boy agreed. “Totally my favorite.”

Stephen nodded slightly, slipping back into his chair and leafing through the pages of the first of the books, eyes dancing over the runes they contained. Even sorcerer’s tomes had indexes, so it didn’t take too long for Stephen to find what he needed.

“I’m right, of course.” Stephen allowed himself a smirk. “When you split a dimension, you form an entirely new, completely separate universe with its own specific energy signature. See, the energy of a dimension depends exclusively on its position in the multiverse, which depends exclusively on its relationship with Time, which depends exclusively on the specific events and people that occur within its bounds. So when a dimension suddenly finds itself with a different event occurring, it diverges to a different part of the multiverse and thus has a different energy signature.”

He wasn’t really talking to the people around him anymore as he jumped between chapters of the book, confirming his words. 

“Our universe is so wrong because it has a completely relationship with Time, but a parallel relationship with dimensional position. And that’s against every property of… anything. Everything.”

This was… amazing. This was impossible and unimaginable  and so, so  _ interesting  _ and Stephen forgot to keep the exhilaration from his face and his words as he began to circle the table, books opening themselves as he passed, pages flipping in the presence of his power. 

“We’re parallel. We’re similar. We aren’t a split timeline, we’re a  _ splinter.  _ We’re still connected to our parent world, orbiting it. So we can join it again. Because we belong with it, and it belongs with us, and the combination of all the elements of the two universes will be compatible because we  _ already share  _ a timeline that shouldn’t be the same, and we’re already primed for the joining of realities. Oh, me from the future is  _ good!”  _

“You’re… weirdly excited by this,” Stark pointed out, and Stephen fell back into his body with a bump.

He quickly recovered his control of his expression and movement. “Someone just told me I could combine two  _ universes,  _ Mr. Stark.”

The man winced, waving a hand. “Don’t call me that; only the kid calls me that and it’s bad enough when he does it. What language is that?”

Thrown off by the sudden change of subject, it took Stephen a beat to realize what Stark was asking. “Oh, Sanskrit,” Stephen answered, gesturing to the fluid writing on one of the tomes. “And that one’s Avestan, and that’s some variation of Aryan.” 

“You speak… Indo-European?” Stark was frowning at him.

“Indo-Iranian,” Stephen clarified. “The grammatical structures are similar between them, so it isn’t hard to smooth out the inconsistencies.”

“Hm.”

If Stephen didn’t know better, he might have thought the man begrudgingly impressed.

Peter was raising his hand again, and Stephen turned to him. “Yes, the curly one in the front.”

“Ha, ha.” The kid half rolled his eyes. “I was just gonna ask, if these two dimensions are different, what will the past and present of the merged universe look like?”

“It’ll be… interesting, that’s for sure,” Stephen said. He fiddled with his sling-ring, slipping it on and off his ring and middle fingers. “But I think… we belong in Loki’s universe, not the other way around. So the energies and events of this one will… fill the gaps of that reality, almost?” Stephen rubbed at his chin.

“What do you mean?” That from Loki, leaning forward almost imperceptibly. 

“Some things will combine if those things can be compatible, like memories and other immaterialities,” Stephen said. “But in the case of things…  _ missing  _ from Loki’s universe, the corresponding thing from our universe would replace it.”

“‘Thing’ like event?” Rhodes asked. “Or thing like person or object?”

“‘Thing’ like anything with a significant energy signature within its dimension. So a person or an object with a long and complex history that’s been important to many cultures, or a building that has become inseparable from the movement of Time. Something essential to the continuity of life.”

“I’m dead in what you keep referring to as ‘my’ universe.” Loki brushed his hair out of his face, shifting in his chair again. “What would that mean for the return?”  
“You’d be resurrected, in all likelihood.” The words felt strange and ridiculous as Stephen spoke them, but they were amazingly, shockingly true. 

“What about if you’re alive in both universes?” Peter gestured to Stephen. “We know you are.”

“That’s a bit less obvious,” Stephen began. He paused as he saw the Cloak emerging from the bookshelves again, empty handed—or empty hemed. “Could you not find it?”

The Cloak bobbed affirmatively, floating over to settle on his shoulders. 

“Wong must’ve taken it,” Stephen said to the relic. “It’s fine; didn’t really need it, as it turns out.” He looked back at the questioning group, who were watching him and the Cloak with varying amounts of irritation and curiosity. “Anyway. A consciousness would merge in the body with the strongest dimensional signature—which would likely be that of Loki’s timeline, as it is the parent dimension. But if something modified that body, and that modification became essential to the life of the person, or others around them…” Stephen bit his bottom lip, thinking through the rules. 

“It all depends on dimensional signature,” he finally said. “And life is what creates strength in that regard. Not a ‘naturalness’ or a ‘purity’; anything that would promote the production of dimensional energy. Anything that would encourage as much life as possible, in any form.”

“Pretending I understand anything you just said—” Colonel Rhodes raised his hand— “what about memories?”

That answer was far easier. “Memories can coexist, so I assume anyone living in both would simply remember their lives within each timeline.”

Stark hummed. “But it’s two sets of memories within the same space in time. No one remembers multiple entirely different events that occurred in the same moment—how can you be sure those memories can ‘coexist’?”

Stephen looked at him, face perfectly blank.

“I’m sure.”

Something in Stephen’s expression, or lack of anything there at all, made Stark nod once. It was cold and quick, but Stephen hardly noticed.

Swallowing, Stephen blinked the ridged face and violet gaze from his mind. A fisted hand massaged his chest, unable to ignore the memory of the Eye’s warmth and power. Around Stephen’s shoulders, the Cloak tightened comfortingly. 

“Besides my being the only one with any logical understanding of the multiverse, what exactly do you need me for?” Stephen asked, settling back into his chair. 

“Last I checked, that and that alone,” Stark replied. That flickering distrust hardened his words, and Stephen’s gaze flicked over his form, still propped up against the table. 

“You’re injured,” he finally observed, not sure why.

The distrust rose to expression level, twisting the man’s expression into something like suspicion, like loathing. “Oh? And you found that out the same way you’re  _ in my dreams?” _

Stephen peered at him beneath raised eyebrows. “I found that out from the fact that you’re favoring your right side even though it’s obviously dominant, there’s bandages covering your shoulder when your collar shifts, and the dreams, apparently, are mutual!”

Silence, for a long moment.

“What?” Rhodes finally blurted, and his voice was shrill in the quiet room. 

“I’ve been dreaming about Stark for five weeks. Stark and others—this kid included—and I’m one-hundred and seven percent positive that it’s the fault of this whole bonded dimension. So don’t blame me for lack of sleep; I’ve got enough of that already.”

“I’ve… had a few dreams too, I think,” Peter said slowly. “About… a glowing lady. And a gauntlet.”

Loki stiffened, and all eyes turned to him. “A gauntlet?” 

“Yeah.”

“Gold? Too big for a human? Terribly well designed?”

Peter frowned. “I don’t… I think so? I don’t really remember. It was a dream.”

Loki grimaced. “That’s Thanos’s gauntlet. I don’t know why you’d have it, but it must be something that happened to you. Happ _ ens  _ to you. Later.”

“That’s impossible,” Stark broke in. “You’d never be within eight miles of this asshole who’s decided to destroy our universe.”

Peter raised an eyebrow. Stark raised his right back. 

“How long do we have until this… Thanos character decides to arrive?” Stephen said, trying to steer the conversation back to something that at least resembled productivity. 

“Year and a half or so,” Peter answered after a moment. Loki tossed the Stone back to him, and he tucked it into his pocket. 

“Oh. Plenty of time, then.”

“Not really, when you consider that we have to find six hidden universally powerful objects while he’s searching for them right beside us.” Loki chucked his knife at the table, and Stephen saw nervous tick when the Cloak saw a projectile. The ancient piece of furniture was saved another dent by the Cloak’s quick movements. 

“Well,” Stephen murmured, propping his chin on his knuckles, “what are we to do next?”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Any questions? I'll try to clarify anything confusing. :)


	51. Fight Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Guess who has a calc 2 test tomorrow... :\  
> But! Here's a chapter that saved my sanity! Sorry I didn't make it to your awesome comments; do know I appreciated every one, and hope you enjoy this next chapter!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“So, let me get this straight,” Strange said, resignation in his tone. “Me from a different future has given you, Loki of Asgard, a quest to save the world that is apparently inseparable from the individuals I apparently know from this different future but have hardly heard of here?”

“Yup,” Peter answered for Loki. He wasn’t really listening to the doctor, a bit distracted by the corner of the Cloak that kept trying to poke curiously at his ankle. 

“The quest being; find six rocks, kill a god—”

“Not a god,” Loki was quick to assure. “A Titan.”

“Kill a Titan, whatever, and merge universes back together.”

No one contradicted the wizard; as ridiculous as it was, he was exactly correct. 

“Well it seems we should begin by locating the Stones and individuals,” Strange said, standing. His Cloak wriggled on his shoulders. 

“We’ve got three of six, right?” Rhodes asked, rising as well. 

“Three?” There was a flicker of surprise on the wizard’s stoic face. 

“Two greens and Vision’s yellow.” Stark hummed. “I don’t think Loki’s Stone counts to our total of six. It’s a plus one.”

“It’s just as important, though,” Peter said, hopping to his feet. “It’s how we’re gonna direct the universes back together, right?”

“Likely. But who said anything about collecting this universe’s Time Stone?”

Stark raised an eyebrow at the man. He was almost a head shorter, but the authoritative scowl didn’t lose an iota of its power. “You have it; that much is obvio—”

“Finding only. No one is  _ collecting  _ Infinity Stones,” Strange snapped, and Peter had to forcibly keep himself from covering his mouth in shock. 

The wizard had  _ interrupted Tony Stark. _

“These objects have immense, uncontainable power. Keeping them in your  _ pocket—”  _ he glanced at Peter, expression hard— “is dangerous enough, but getting them within the same building, the same  _ city?  _ You have no idea the trouble your asking for.”

Mr. Stark crossed his arms, his jaw feathering as he met Strange’s eyes. “The universe is in danger of ending from an alien threat; we’re already in trouble.”

“Careless handling of the Stones is  _ asking  _ for catastrophe.”

“We’re doing this on  _ your  _ word!” Stark snarled.

Without mirth, the doctor chuckled. “We are  _ locating  _ Stones, not trying to gather them. I told you to find them.”

“Yes, in order to use them,” Loki said, now also on his feet. Heads swiveled comically to look at him. 

Stark lifted a hand to indicate the god. “What he said.”

“How did this ‘Thanos’ find the Stones?” Strange responded, not missing a beat. “I’m willing to bet this very quest is his  _ life’s work.  _ How easy, how obvious would it be when three, or even four of the most  _ powerful objects in the dimension  _ are stuffed in some compound on our planet? How dangerous for the people of this world?”

“Most of them are scattered throughout the whole of the universe,” Peter chimed in, raising a hand.

Stark pointed to him. “See, gathering them as we go is so much more efficient. We’ll keep them with us, keep them off this planet—”

Rhodes whirled. “Wait, wait, Tony, you just said ‘off this planet—” 

“Mr. Stark, are we going to spa—”

Stark, nodding, kept speaking, “using the energy signatures from this Stone, the wizard’s, and Vision’s we can—”

_“ENOUGH!”_ _  
_ Voices cut off almost involuntarily as the word thundered through the small room.

Strange’s hands had fisted at his sides, eyes dark with a furious sort of shadow. Something that could have been a smile but certainly wasn’t anymore exposed his teeth as he chuckled, “How little you understand is so  _ funny.” _

“Oh?” Stark glowered, and Peter didn’t dare speak—the thunderous energy of the two men was almost electric. 

“Infinity Stones are not similar. Their energies may be the same in strength, but you cannot _find one_ with another. Power and Soul, Mind and Space, Reality and Time.” Strange shook his head. “They will tear you apart from the inside out. You think holding the very _embodiment_ of Time will be easy? You think using it will be anything more than catastrophic?”  
“The kid has that ‘embodiment of Time’--” Stark lowered his voice in a mocking sort of drawl as he quoted the wizard— “in the pocket of his jeans.”

“Not this universe’s,” Strange hissed. “And in all that time you’ve been wandering about with that Stone, have you ever really touched it?”

No one answered.

“Exactly.” Strange strode around the table, holding out his palm. There was hardly any choice but to pull out the Stone and place it in the wizard’s palm.

“This is the Time Stone’s protective aura,” Strange turned back to Stark, words slowing as they would when talking to a child. “This is what’s keeping you from being overwhelmed by its aura and power. You haven’t been holding this Stone, you’ve been holding its containment. And  _ Vishanti help you  _ if you ever accidentally use its power.” 

“Do  _ enlighten us,”  _ Stark purred dangerously, circling the table.

Peter, knowing full well how it felt to be on the receiving end of that tone, would have fled without question at this point. But Strange just stared the shorter man down and  _ returned it. _

“Tapping the power of an Infinity Stone opens you up to the remnant of the multiverse that it contains,” Strange drawled. “Without training, without understanding of the energies of the Mystic Arts, that remnant of the multiverse would invade you—”

One of his hands fizzled with muddy chestnut power when he waved it before Stark’s face.

“—control you—”

The energy sparked aggressively.

“—and destroy you, one cell at a time.”

Silently, explosively, Strange’s magic devoured itself until there was nothing left but the unsettled feeling in Peter’s chest.

Strange took a step back, lifting his chin. “And you want to get them all in a contained space? Together? I thought they said you were intelligent.”

“We wouldn’t use them.” Stark shook his head, though there was a tension in his form that hadn’t been there before. “Not until the end, when we have all seven—”

“Have  _ located—” _

“Have  _ collected.”  _ Stark glared at the wizard, far too close now. Peter took a step back as aggression crackled.

“I’ve been waiting for this.” Stark’s shoulders pressed themselves back, his voice powerful despite its quietness. “For four years, this  _ Thanos  _ has been inside my head. For four years, I’ve waited for the  _ something  _ that would arrive, the destiny that would come. But I’m not waiting anymore. We’re not going to stop Thanos,  _ Doctor.  _ We’re going to race him, and we’re going to  _ win.” _

“Not by giving him a head start,” Strange insisted. 

Stark threw up his hands. “Why are you so fucking adamant that  _ six of us— _ plus the inevitable others that we collect along the way per  _ your own list _ —can’t handle Infinity Stones we’ll  _ never even use?” _

“Because you will use them!” Strange’s voice finally cracked, its sheen of control shattering to something utterly wild. “You will use them, you already have! You’ve seen that endless potential within them, and you  _ took  _ it.” 

The doctor whirled to Loki, one scarred hand jabbing toward him. “You’ve tasted the freedom and the power of the Space Stone. Portals anywhere, unlimited by the laws of matter, the power to twist locations and speeds and transport to your disposal? Even now, you’d still take it without hesitation.”

He turned to Stark. “You saw the Mind Stone. You saw it, and you knew its potential enough to build for it,  _ twice.  _ I don’t care that Ultron was evil and Vision is good, it wouldn’t matter either way. You used a Stone and it felt just  _ wonderful,  _ didn’t it?”

Peter waited, but Stark did not answer, did not so much as twitch to deny or confirm Strange’s claim. 

“How would you know?” the engineer finally asked. 

Strange laughed, and it was brittle and tasteless as sawdust. “Because I’ve used one too.”

Silence, for a long, stretching moment. 

“The Stones aren’t tools we can find and use at our disposal,” Strange murmured, the control snapping back into place above his words. “They are the very definition of potential, of capability. They are everything we could ever want, and they are  _ everything we could ever fear. _

“You do not,” he continued, finally stepping away from Stark, “just put them in the pocket of your jeans.”

Peter, finally finding his breath, glanced at Loki in the uncomfortable quiet that followed. The god shrugged, mouthing something Peter didn’t quite catch, and sidled toward him. He stopped the advance after a moment when the rustle of his clothes was almost deafening in the silence. No one else moved for a long, long time. 

It was the Colonel who broke the silence. “Should I applaud?” he asked, eyebrows raised, “or are you two still going.”

“Shut it, Rhodey,” Tony sighed, folding backward in a long, somewhat dangerous movement to flop back into his chair. 

Peter offered the atmosphere a tentative smile at that, moving back behind the backrest of his own chair in case things got explosive again. Loki joined him.

“I have to hand it to you,” Rhodes said, his words directed at the wizard this time. “You held up well under the ‘fuck you I’m Iron Man’ stare.”

“Excuse me?” Strange demanded.

“Does this happen often?” Peter said simultaneously, pointing to the two. 

“Tony attacking random wizards?” Rhodes shrugged. “Usually they aren’t wizards, and usually they aren’t so willing to attack him back.”

Strange lifted his eyes to the heavens as Peter dropped his forehead into his palm. “You are hopeless,” the boy said. 

“Me? Me,  _ I’m _ hopeless?” Stark demanded, still glaring in the wizard’s direction. “This idiot—”

“Do  _ not  _ start again,” Rhodes interrupted. “They’ll be plenty of time to argue about this when we have contacted all involved parties. Namely the android that is currently  _ living  _ off one of these Stones.”

“I look forward to it,” Strange said flatly.

Peter and Loki exchanged another look. 

In all honesty, this wasn’t what Peter had been expecting when Loki had described the wizard. Strange didn’t disappoint with the wardrobe, certainly, but he didn’t seem… Peter frowned, unable to think of the adjective. 

He looked back at Strange as the man gathered his books into a towering pile and scooped them into his arms. Long spine uncurling, he made his way toward the bookshelves, his Cloak fluttering out behind him as a counterbalance. It would have been ridiculous if Peter had gotten over the whole ‘magic’ thing. Which he hadn’t. At all. 

Perhaps what made Strange seem so weird wasn’t what he was, but what he  _ wasn’t.  _ He was so obviously powerful, guarded, and mysterious, with unusual and interesting comprehensions of things Peter hadn’t even heard of. He should seem dangerous, or at the very least, threatening. 

But instead, he seemed… intriguing. Quirky. Peter  _ wanted  _ to understand him, not just consult him before slipping out and never thinking about Strange again. 

He wasn’t sure he liked the doctor, though. And he wasn’t sure he trusted him—the prickling of Peter’s spider-sense was enough to keep him from it. 

“So said Peter Parker,” Peter mumbled under his breath.

“What?” Loki peered at him.

“Nothing, nothing.” Peter waved a hand, watching Strange thump his books atop the nearest shelf and begin to sort them. Beside him, Loki did the same. 

“Back to the Compound, then?” Rhodes asked.

Mr. Stark was still pulsing with irritation, but he stood and nodded toward the Colonel. Peter rubbed his hands together, warming them in the chill air of Strange’s building, and trotted over to join them. “I hope Happy doesn’t think we’re dead.”

“Nah,” Stark shrugged. “He’s used to it. Off we go.”

Turning on his heel, the engineer led them from the room. His strides were long and somewhat aggressive, and he didn’t so much as glance toward the library. Peter heard Loki scoff. He fell into step at the back, behind the rest, bouncing a bit on the balls of his feet. 

When no sound of footsteps trailed him, Peter paused by the door of the library, a hand on the wood. He waited a beat; still nothing.

“Doctor Strange?”

There was a grunt from somewhere within the shelves.

“We’re, uh, leaving.”

“Bye.” The call was curt, impatient.

Peter frowned. “Aren’t you coming?”

A pause. 

“I definitely hope not.” The tall shadow of Strange slid around the bookshelves, glancing in Peter’s direction. 

The boy waved on instinct. “No, no, we’re just going to get Vision. And you’re obviously the ‘only one with any logical understanding of the multiverse’ so I think you’re supposed to come. The planning session isn’t over.”

Strange raised an eyebrow. “That’s what that was?”

“What?”

“Have any of you actually  _ made  _ a plan before?”

Peter wracked his brain. “Uh… not one that’s ever gone the way it was supposed to.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“But that’s why we need you, see?” Peter gestured toward the door. “This is the fate of the universe, and we can’t afford to screw it up.”

Strange sighed, looking impassively at the exit. “I haven’t ever even made a plan, let alone had one go right, so you’ve got the wrong sorcerer for that.”

“Great,” Peter said with a hint of sarcasm. “Literally everyone we have on our team does things by improvisation. What could  _ possibly go wrong?” _

“Would you like them alphabetically or chronologically?” There was a flicker of a smile on Strange’s face, and it made him look far less severe. 

“Are you two coming?” called Stark down the hallway. 

Peter ducked his head through the door, waving. “Yeah Mr. Stark, I was just grabbing Doctor Strange!”

When he looked back, Strange had sidled over to peer through the doorway with an air of amusement. “They have no idea where they are, do they.”

“Well, you did teleport us up here?”

The doctor sighed, and in the space between Peter’s next blink, they were standing in front of the group of heroes. Peter hardly stumbled this time. 

“Please refrain from wandering about my Sanctum,” Strange droned. “If you would like to get somewhere…”

He stepped back, right hand rising to extend before his left and beginning to slice circularly through the air. Peter watched, wide-eyed, as a trail of leaping, glowing russet light scattered from the path of his fingers. 

Within them grew the Compound.

“Holy  _ shit!”  _ Peter yelped. “You can do that?”

“Indeed,” the wizard said over his shoulder, stepping through the gateway and sliding his feet on the smooth ground of the Compound. 

Which was astonishingly  _ right there in front of them.  _

Peter grinned widely. “Can you do that?” he asked, cocking his head at Loki.

The Asgardian glowered. “My methods of transportation do not involve  _ arm circles.” _

“So you can’t do that,” Peter concluded. He stepped toward the portal, a bit hesitantly. “This is… woah. I mean, dimensional manipulation, that totally undermines everything we thought about the initial singularity. Do you tap into eternal inflation or is that just theoretical, too?”

Strange regarded him with something that could have been surprise. “It’s—”

Peter waved a hand experimentally through the gateway. 

Whatever Strange was going to say was cut off by another voice, slicing through the room and edged with fear. “Kid  _ no!” _

Peter paused at the sharpness, his arm retracting to his side instinctually. 

Mr. Stark was lowering a hand, the fingers on his right gripping his left upper arm somewhat aggressively. Tense, uncomfortably so, he might have been paler as he watched the shimmering light of Strange’s gateway. It could have been the light, but it was enough to make Peter’s spider-sense tingle with unease. 

The boy stepped back.

“What is it?” Strange asked, vaulting back through the portal.

“Nothing,” Stark snapped. Peter could see the effort it took him to look away from the magic, the tension in every muscle of the man’s form.

Strange’s gaze flickered over him, and Peter saw one eye squint slightly. 

“Happy’s still in the car,” Rhodes said, stepping in front of Stark. He was angled slightly toward him, somehow managing to face both his friend and the group around them at the same time. “We’ll meet you in the Compound.”

“Of course,” Strange agreed. Peter frowned—there wasn’t a hint of confusion in the doctor’s words. 

It felt like he’d been teleported again; one moment, the five of them were standing there in the sepia light of the gateway, and the next, Rhodes and Mr. Stark had disappeared toward the great hall of the Sanctum and only Peter, Loki, and Strange remained. 

“Interesting,” murmured the doctor, gaze still trained on where the others had disappeared.

Peter glanced helplessly at Loki, who could only shrug. 

“Anyway,” the doctor said, gesturing toward the still pulsing portal. “Let’s go.”

There was nothing either of them could do but oblige. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Boys, boys, you're both powerful superheroes with experience and understanding. Can we all just get along now?


	52. To Be Believed

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“Can I shoot him?”

“No,” Rhodey sighed.

“How about stab him?”

“Now you sound like Loki.”

“Incapacitate with nanobots?”

A thump as Rhodey’s foot connected with the back of Tony’s chair. He felt it through the padded leather. 

“No, Tony.”

“Stick him to a wall and shake him until he sees sense?”

“Technically that’s not illegal, but I think antagonizing the wizard wouldn’t be the most intelligent course of action.”

Tony scowled, watching his reflection in the windshield before him. His hip and shoulder ached something wicked, but they weren’t bleeding; Pepper wouldn’t destroy him, at least. 

“Why don’t we like the wizard?” Happy asked as he craned over the steering wheel to make a precise left. 

“Because he’s a meddling asshole with far too much confidence and no common sense,” Tony said.

“Because he disagrees with Tony’s initial plan, is adamant against Tony’s opinion, doesn’t yet understand that the first idderations of Tony’s ideas are bat-shit crazy, and isn’t intimidated whatsoever by the ‘fuck you I’m Iron Man’ stare,” Rhodey summarized. 

“Oh.” Happy cleared his throat. “Can we…” He trailed off.

“What?” Tony demanded.

“Can we turn around so I can meet him?”

Exasperated, Tony threw up his hands as Rhodey barked a laugh. 

“He’s coming to the Compound,” Rhodey said. “You’ll meet him.”

“He’s already there,” Tony grumbled. He adjusted the seat belt so it didn’t dig into his collarbone, itching the compressed skin there. 

“Huh?”

“That’s why you’re only driving the two of us.” Rhodey leaned forward, putting his elbows on the front seats to situate himself between Tony and Happy. “The wizard can portal.”

“Oh…” Happy tried to hide it, but Tony saw the glance the man shot his way anyway.

Tony sighed, running the tips of his fingers over his face. 

He could still see it in his vision, the gap of space that had simply dropped away between his Compound and the Sanctum. It hadn’t been space on the other side, hadn’t been a clouded gate of blue and silver, but it had felt the same. The same prickle of unnaturalness, the same shimmer in the atmosphere of dropping into an entirely new location. The same danger.

And the kid had went to touch it…

Logically, Tony had known nothing was to happen. Logically, he’d known a lot of things. But that didn’t stop the bomb and the chitauri and the death from sweeping through his mind. It hadn’t stopped the starlight.

He never wanted to see another of Strange’s gateways again. 

“I’m fine,” Tony said as Happy snuck another glance. “Just not about to go  _ through  _ one.”

Happy nodded, and Rhodey hummed. “Do you know how he makes them?”

“The portals?” Tony twisted to look at his friend. Rhodey nodded. 

Eyes flickering up and to the left for a moment, Tony tried to extrapolate on the wizard’s words to find some sort of explanation. It wasn’t hard to come by. 

“Blah blah blah.”

“If all magic is is books and words, I bet you’d be good at it,” Rhodey said, shoving himself back against the back of his seat.

“I’d be good at it even if it was more than that,” Tony huffed.

“Uh-huh.”

Tony lifted his eyes to the mirror, squinting at his smirking friend. “Why are you ‘uh-huh'ing me?”

“I haven’t seen you truly  _ miffed  _ since… I dunno when. Happy, when was the last time someone met Tony blow for blow in a snark-match?”

Happy shrugged. “That guy from the UK packed a mean comeback?”

“I don’t even remember who you’re talking about!” Tony protested. “And that’s not—that’s not why I dislike our newest magic-user.”

“Oh?” Rhodey raised his eyebrows.

“He’s hiding something.” Tony tapped his fingers on the dashboard, the drumming noise lost to the speed of the engine. He added, “I don’t trust him,” meaningless as it was.

“Neither do I,” Rhodey sighed. “But I think he had a good point about the Stones.”  
Tony opened his mouth, about to voice his protest with a bit of offense, but Rhodey lifted a hand.

“I’m not saying it was complete, but I am saying it’s valuable. If these weapons are truly capable of everything they’re supposed to be capable of, we’re going to need to be careful. The longer we take, the higher the chance of us being stopped.”

“Exactly. We can’t waste time  _ locating  _ when we’ll have to travel through all of  _ space.”  _ Tony sat back, gesticulating at nothingness. “The chances that we lose our element of surprise are…”

“Astronomical?” Happy supplied.

“Yes, thank you Mr. Space Theme,” Tony sighed.  _ Don’t punch the driver.  _

“You’re being strangely logical.” There was something in Rhodey’s voice, the sliver of familiar suspicion, of concern.

He knew.

Tony sighed, closing his eyes and dropping his head back against the headrest. “It’s Vision,” he finally said.

An anticipatory silence drifted around them, seeded by the rhythmic thrum of the car and the detached sound of traffic. The sun flashed like a strobe light as they drove beneath the scattered shadows of tree branches. Tony could hear his companions breathing. 

“That Stone in his head… he’s in danger.” Tony didn’t wait long to keep speaking. “There’s no question that the alien after these things wouldn’t hesitate to kill him for it. Kill us all for it, but he can’t…”

“He can’t live without it,” Happy hummed. He was nodding, eyes still fixed on the road. 

“Exactly. If we lose, he’ll have to die. And if we win…”

Vision wouldn’t hesitate. If saving the world meant the Infinity Stone keeping him alive, the android wouldn’t so much as consider himself—the sacrifice would be utterly logical to him. Vision or the universe: Tony could already hear his words.

_ ‘It’s basic morality. The good of the many, where I am but one.’ _

God, he was so  _ good, _ so pure. One of the few Tony could trust.

“Maybe you can separate it,” Rhodey suggested. 

“I thought about that,” Tony said. “It’s possible, in theory. Vision is so much more than the Stone; he’s evolving, and he’s  _ himself.  _ But separating each individually connected neuron from what is just as complex as a human brain to isolate that part of him?” Tony shook his head. “It’d be risky. And I wouldn’t want… what if he doesn’t want to give up that part of him?”

“Ask him,” Rhodey assured. “Ask him, and then see if it’s possible.”

Tony nodded without reply.

A hand found his shoulder, squeezing lightly. Tony covered it with his own, eyes still closed, neck still relaxed. 

“He won’t have to die,” Rhodey murmured. “We’ll make sure of it.”

Tony didn’t believe him. 

It wasn’t by any fault of his friend, however. Tony knew that as he nodded, felt it in his overactive mind as he turned his attention back to the road and the Compound growing in the distance. 

He didn’t believe Rhodey, but that didn’t mean the colonel was wrong. That didn’t mean Tony couldn’t make something  _ to be  _ believed out of that simple promise. 

If he couldn’t trust luck, couldn’t trust words, he could trust the metal beneath his hands. 

Chestnut light and maroon skin occupied his thoughts for the rest of the journey.

* * *

 

Peter swallowed another thousand questions as the three of them stepped into the hallway of the Compound, orienting themselves to their abrupt change in location. They were in the conference wing; Peter could tell by the short hall and the wide lounge that sprawled before them a few yards down the passage.

Plus, FRIDAY confirmed it. “Intruders in the West Side,” she began.

“Nonono.” Peter jumped forward, raising his hands frantically. “Just us, FRI, don’t worry.”

There was an almost imperceptible pause as FRIDAY scanned and cataloged their data. 

“Just one intruder,” she clarified.

“Pleased to meet you, talking ceiling,” Strange muttered. 

Loki glanced at him. “Says the guy with the sentient, flying Cloak.”

Peter tried to hide a laugh, but failed to do anything more than choke on his own saliva as he lead the other two down into the lounge. He coughed for a few long seconds.

“You must be Doctor Stephen Strange,” said FRIDAY when Peter’s hacks had died down. 

“Indeed I am,” Strange said. Peter could see his eyes fluttering around the room as they entered, trying to locate a speaker or a camera most likely.

“You won’t find one.” Peter slumped onto the nearest sofa, crossing his legs and stretching his arms above his head. “FRIDAY networks through the whole building.”

“And throughout most of the electronic extensions—vehicles and suchlike,” FRIDAY agreed. 

Loki, who’d come into possession of his Stone and list again, wandered over to perch on the armrest of the couch. The sofa creaked under his weight, and Peter could almost hear May yelling at the god. He held in a smile.

Speaking of…

“FRIDAY, can you tell my aunt we’re back?”

“Already did,” FRIDAY said. “I have also informed Vision. The boss should return in fifteen minutes, depending on if Mr. Hogan misses the turn.”

“Appreciation,” Loki said, pointing to the ceiling.

“He means thank you.”

Loki slid off the armrest and onto the cushion of the sofa. It bounced slightly, and Peter readjusted himself to give the Asgardian more space. Strange sidled towards one of the chairs. He leaned against the back but elected not to sit, though Peter guessed that wouldn’t last. 

“These are comfortable,” Loki declared after stretching himself nearly horizontal. “For the human form, I clarify.”

“Indeed,” Peter said, watching him with amusement. “Does cat-Loki have past experiences with these couches?”

Loki looked up at him, upside-down, and shrugged. “I have to do  _ something  _ while you’re at school.”

“Hate to interrupt,” Strange said, a bit of a chuckle in his tone, “but what did you mean… cat-Loki?”

Loki flipped onto his front, pushing up to regard the wizard. A bit of his playful, relaxed attitude dropped away, and Peter was reminded, yet again, that Loki was so very far from home. 

What had he left? He’d jumped dimensions right after he’d pretended to die—the circumstances weren’t exactly  _ fuzzy.  _ Over their month together, Peter’d gathered a few descriptions of what might have been happening, and even just those vague images… he shivered. 

Blood. Screams. Battle. Enough that human form was too vulnerable, to _true,_ for Loki to keep sometimes.

No wonder he distrusted Strange. 

“It’s a property of my magic,” Loki said curtly. 

Strange nodded, his fingers beginning to tap against the sofa. Peter couldn’t identify a rhythm.

When Loki didn’t elaborate, the wizard dropped onto one elbow, still propped up against the back of the chair. “Is it of dimensional origin?” he asked.

Loki squinted. “The magic?”

A nod.

Swinging his legs around, Loki situated himself more civilly on the couch. Peter watched him, his interest peaked. 

“It’s of… my own origin,” Loki said, sounding a bit miffed. “I create it, I direct it toward the form and function of anything I desire.”

“But it’s an energy manipulation—I saw you conjure weapons.”

Loki lifted a hand, and his knife materialized in a shimmer of greenish energy. “Not conjuring. These are my knives; the same every time.”

“But it’s materialization.” Strange was frowning, but it was the frown of someone given a difficult calculus problem, the frown of thought and recollection. “You aren’t summoning, you’re—”

The door on the far side of the lounge  _ shicked  _ open, cutting Strange off. Peter, Loki, and Strange all straightened, turning as the hallway released its entourage. 

“You’re back  _ remarkably  _ early,” Pepper observed. Vision moved to stand beside her, glancing into the far corridor in an effort to spot the two Avengers they were missing. 

Peter saw Strange’s eyes train on the gem in the android’s forehead. He saw the thoughts begin to hum behind his eyes. 

But Peter didn’t have time to attempt to read them in his nonexistent expression, so he stood and skirted the couch. May laid a hand on his shoulder as he halted next to her.

“Where’s…” she began.

“Stark and the Colonel?” Loki asked. “Taking the car.”

Pepper raised an eyebrow.

“We took a more direct route.” Strange looked all the taller as he clasped his hands behind him, one foot crossed over the other. “Doctor Stephen Strange, at your service.”

“Pepper Potts,” Pepper said, gesturing to herself. 

“I’m, uh, May Parker.” May sounded understandably unnerved, but she didn’t stutter. “Pleased to meet you?”

“Likewise,” Strange said quickly. “And you must be the Vision.”

“Hm? Yes.” Vision turned his attention to them. “Apologies that I couldn’t meet you with the others; we feared it would be dangerous, and I had information to reconcile myself with.” He smiled, though it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “But you know all about that, I assume.”

“Yup.” Strange brushed untamed hair out of his eyes. “I sense things are about to get very complicated very quickly.”

Peter barked a laugh. “Are they ever not?”

Strange glanced at him, smirking. “Not in my experience.”

“Seconded,” Loki sighed, draping over the sofa again.

Peter hoped Happy drove quickly. 

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: MUST INSERT LINE TO REMIND THEM THAT STEPHEN'S HAIR HAS LOST ALL SEMBLANCE OF 'DO'--
> 
> *cough cough* anyway, thanks for reading! If you were wondering, I got an A on my calc test. *victory pose*. See you soon!


	53. Message Ends

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*

 

**Earth-199999:** **_February 2026_ **

 

_ “3/02/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 9:30 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hey Doctor Strange! Know you’re busy, but I was just calling to say hi. Sorry I haven’t stopped by in a while; all my classes decided to load on the stupid projects all at the same time. I swear they coordinate that. Pffff…  Anyway, see you soon I hope! Bye.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “3/21/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 4:47 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hi! It’s Peter again. Is it alright if I bring Morgan and Pepper to see you? She wanted to ask you about something but I can’t remember what it was. Pepper, I mean. Sorry. Thanks!” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “4/14/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 10:01 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hi Doctor. Peter here. I haven’t heard from you in a while and I wanted to make sure you were okay. If it’s magic, you should totally tell me. That would be so cool. Unless you’re hurt or something, that’s not cool and definitely not what I meant.  _

_ “I’ve been practicing my cribbage and I think I’ve finally got my strategy down. So when you get back… just look out, man. Heh! _

_ “Alright, hope to see you soon! Bye.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “4/31/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 6:45 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hi Doc! Tag.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “5/09/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 4:09 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_“Hey Stephen… sorry, I know it’s early. Sorry to keep bothering you. It’s just… it’s been seven months since the Blip and they’re doing a thing. Another thing. They keep doing all these stupid speeches and memorials and ‘rememberances’ of the five years where all of us were gone, as if anyone wants to remember it anyway!_ _  
__“Sigh… sorry. I’m just really kind of angry and I don’t want to go and hear anyone’s platitudes anymore. But everyone says I should go—this one’s the biggest get-together and the biggest fundraiser for the fallout of the snap and it’s important, I_ know _it’s important. I don’t want to go, though._

_ “So I thought I’d see if you’d come with me. If you’re still busy that’s fine. Or if you just don’t want to go. No use both of us suffering through it, am I right? Pfff… _

_ “I just… I just really miss… the way things used to be. And if I look back at them I might not be able to see what’s around me anymore, y’know? _

_ “Anyway, call me back when you know. See you later maybe. Bye.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “5/27/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 8:30 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hi Doctor! I stopped by today and Wong looked stormier than usual… he said you weren’t dead though, so that’s good. Probably on a super secret mission. You’re probably not even getting these but whatever, I can blab into the phone as much as I want. Anyway, good luck with whatever you’re doing. The people of Earth are most grateful. _

_ “Alright, that’s all, I think. Bye!” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “6/09/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 8:44 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hi Strange! May says she’ll play us at cribbage if the Cloak will give her the third set of pegs. My money’s on her winning, honestly. Hope your mission’s going well! _

_ “Oh, it’s Peter by the way. Heh. Bye!” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

 

 _  
__“6/15/2024. ONE MESSAGE:_ Spider-Parker AT _3:15 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS._

_ “Hey Doctor Strange. Just wanted to let you know I’m off to Europe with my class next week. We’re going on a tour and stuff. If you get back and I’m gone, that’s what’s up. Bye!” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “6/29/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 9:27 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Update, I am now the next Tony Stark?” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “6/30/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 4:05 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Where are you? Fury says you’re  _ ‘unavailable’  _ but I really, really need your help—I fucked up. I screwed everything up…  _

_ “Just—where are you, Strange?” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “7/04/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 3:56 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Oof, that was CRAZY! Sorry, I probably freaked you out with that last message. But I made it work! Only almost died like eight times but it’s fine because—you now, I’ll just tell you when you get back, okay? Now you have to show up, else you’ll live in suspense forever. Heh heh. _

_ “Anyway, Peter out! Good luck Doctor Strange.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “7/10/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 10:02 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Doctor Strange—god it’s P—it’s Peter, it’s Spider-Man, I’m not what they say I am—you have to believe me, it’s tech, it’s this illusion stuff with drones and greenscreen and I didn’t say that, I didn’t kill him, I’m not—I’m not evil, please. I don’t know if you’ll hear this but if you’re here, if you can help me… please. _

_ “They all know now. I don’t know where to go, I don’t want to put Pepper and Morgan in danger and May’s already… she’s… Happy’s gonna help me but he told me to call you, just in case. If you don’t get this until I’m… until whatever happens happens, just please believe me, okay? I’m still Peter. I’m still… I’m still me.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “9/02/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 7:29 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hey Doctor. I found a place to stay for longer than just a few days. That’s good. I can’t tell you where it is, obviously, but it’ll work. Thank god for SHIELD, am I right? _

_ “Things are hectic. I should have expected that but… I can see why Tony was so fixated on cheeseburgers. I’d kill for one right about now. _

_ “Anyway. Just wanted to update you. Um. Yeah. _

_ “Bye.” _

_  “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “10/29/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 11:00 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hey. Um. Yeah, that’s all, just hey.” _

_  “MESSAGE ENDS.”  _

  
  


_ “10/31/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 10:24 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Happy Halloween, Doctor Strange. Don’t let anyone get possessed.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “11/28/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 9:06 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Happy Thanksgiving! I’m trying to be thankful. It’s working, I think.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “12/26/2024. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 12:35 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Happy holidays, doc. Hope you’re celebrating somewhere.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “2/14/2025. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 9:30 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Moving again. I think SHIELD’s working everything out at this point, so that’s good. It’s winter now and I don’t want to be stuck anywhere for that. I hate cold.  _

_ “Anyway, uh, long time no see. Even T’Challa says hi. Don’t ask, it’s a long story. Goodbye, I suppose.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “5/14/2025. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 10:24 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “I don’t even know if you’re still alive…” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “7/04/2025. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 3:00 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Hey Doc. Peter here. Happy Fourth of July or something? Captain America existed day? Hope you’re okay. Bye.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “11/19/2025. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 2:19 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “I’m back in New York! Thanks for nothing by the way.  _

_ “Kidding, kidding, I don’t blame you. We dealt with  _ that  _ before. But yeah, I’ll stop by tomorrow, okay? I swear if you’ve just forgotten about your phone for almost two years… I’ll do something to you. I don’t know what, but it will NOT BE GOOD. _

_ “Happy to be back. Bye.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “1/01/2026. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 10:59 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “Happy new year!  _

_ … _

_ “Wong won’t even tell me if you’re alive. I… really hope you’re not dead. Please don’t be dead, okay?” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “1/19/2026. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 7:08 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “I told Pepper congratulations for you.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “1/25/2026. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 9:36 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “No one thinks its strange—no pun intended—that you’re gone. Not even May. They all just shrug like you’re some sort of ghost that shows up whenever it’s least convenient.    _

_ “I’m not buying it, asshole. I’m not buying it.  _

_ “If no one else is, I’ll be happy when you come back.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “2/06/2026. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker AT _ 5:17 PM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “I found my cribbage board.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


_ “2/10/2026. ONE MESSAGE:  _ Spider-Parker  _ AT 11:46 AM. MESSAGE BEGINS. _

_ “I miss you.” _

_ “MESSAGE ENDS.” _

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *more finger guns*


	54. Bioelectric Output of the Human Brain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey it's me, back at it again at krispy kream
> 
> Warning for technical jargon and comic book science and me pretending like I know what I'm talking about.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“Alright,” Tony said, turning to face the room around him. “Let’s address the elephant in the room.”

Eight people regarded him with varying emotions, scattered through the room around him. Most had been waiting when he, Rhodey, and Happy had arrived, impressively calmly considering the array of personalities and powers. 

“Which elephant is that?” Pepper inquired, crossing her arms. “The one about the nanobots keeping you from bleeding to death? Or the one about the multiple magicians in my compound? Or the one about—”

“I’m  _ fine,  _ thank you, no bleeding to death here,” Tony sighed. He glanced at Strange, who was looking between him and Pep with that continuous smirk. “Strange is just as annoying as Loki but hopefully less homicidal.”

“Hey!” Loki exclaimed, straightening up. 

“I resent being compared to him.” Strange glanced over at Loki with distaste. 

“Likewise,” Loki hissed. 

“Getting back to the elephant in the room?” That from Peter, with a pointed nod in Tony’s direction.

_ “Thank you,”  _ Tony sighed. “Vision, you’re the elephant in the room.”

“Assuming I am inferring the correct meaning of this expression, I am not surprised.” The android was sitting next to Peter on the sofa, the latter sandwiched between Vision and his aunt. He wore jeans and an overly formal button-up shirt, stark against his maroon skin. At first glance, they seemed normal, but Tony could see the slight shimmer across their surface that indicated Vision was practicing his phasing.

The explanation was quick and clean, as Tony had long since compartmentalized the aspects of their completely insane task. No one interrupted him, aside from wizard when Tony asked him to clarify multiversal aspects, and it didn’t take long to catch the rest of the group up.

“We have already  _ gathered—”  _ Tony shot Strange a pointed glance— “two of the six Stones. Two-point-five, if we’re being specific.” 

Loki patted his side, and Tony assumed he’d taken possession of the Alternate Time Stone.

“That’s a mouthful,” Tony sighed. The room’s inhabitants looked at him, confused. 

Tony shifted his weight off his injured hip and continued, “I’m making an executive decision. Loki, your Time Stone is henceforth dubbed the Time Gem. Strange, yours is the Stone.”

Peter gave a thumbs-up, and the rest nodded in agreement—or at least acknowledgement. Sticking his hands into his back pocket, Tony looked toward Vision.

“Thing is,” he began, keeping his voice controlled, “to use these Stones to merge our dimensions…”

“You need to unite them,” Vision finished. He tapped the Stone in his forehead, and the sound rung too loud between the people around him. 

“Yeah,” Tony murmured. He gave into the urge to move forward, to stand before his friend, the machine that had become so much more than his creation. “I have an idea.”

“So do I,” Vision said. His shoulders had hunched, just slightly. “I’ve been giving a good deal of thought—”

“Gonna stop you right there,” Rhodey interrupted. “Sorry Vis. Tony has an idea that doesn’t involve self-sacrifice.”

“Ha!” Pepper barked from the far wall.

Eight faces pivoted to stare at her.

“Nothing,” she said, and Tony could tell she was choking on another laugh. “I was just… laughing in agreement.”

“I realize what I said,” Rhodey sighed. 

Tony grimaced at him, confused, and everyone’s attention whirled back to Rhodes as if watching a tennis match. 

“Tony has an idea that doesn’t involve  _ anybody else’s  _ self-sacrifice,” Rhodey clarified, and before Tony could do anything more than choke on the seeds of a protest, the man was moving on.

“You’re more than the Stone, you always were,” Rhodey explained, moving closer to where Vision was perched. “It jump started whatever… brain stuff was happening—”

“The electrical connections within the non-sequential synapses,” Tony elaborated.

“—yes,” Rhodey sighed, “which means—”

“You built an artificial polymorph of neurons?” 

The collective gaze of the room swiveled again; Strange had straightened from the chair he’d been leaning on. Eyes that Tony had earlier identified as blue now gleamed hazel as the wizard cocked his head. 

“Yeah,” Tony said, his brows furrowing slightly. “I extrapolated from the base code of my artificial intelligence.”

“But a 3D, physical rendering of those connections would be… between three and four  _ trillion  _ neurons,” Strange’s shaking hands rose, gesturing as he spoke, “in order to achieve the functionality of such a machine.”

The wizard paused, glancing at Vision. “Apologies; a being. I didn’t mean any offense.”

“None taken,” said the android. He cupped his chin in his hand, watching Strange with some mixture of interest and amusement. 

“You  _ built  _ a brain.”

“The structure of one,” Tony admitted. His words were a bit hesitant—in all honesty, he was surprised by the expanse of the wizard’s logic. By his metal math, for another thing. “The life came from the Stone.”

“Thank the Vishanti,” Strange chuckled. “I was worried we’d discovered the makeup of a thought while I was busy learning the Mystic Arts.”

Tony grinned, involuntarily. “I’m sure even you would have heard about it.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” Strange rolled his eyes, but Tony didn’t think it was at him—for once. “I’ve encountered far too many things that think when they shouldn’t.”

His Cloak perked up around his neck—

And then, to Tony’s shock, it slapped its master in the face.

“Hey, hey, I didn’t mean you  _ exclusively!”  _ Strange hissed. “I was thinking more, y’know, Hong Kong and the Stieve of—”

He cut himself off, wrestling his cape back into something that resembled submission. 

May raised a hand.

“Um, your Cloak’s alive,” she said flatly.

“Yes,” sighed Strange. “I should have introduced you. Cloak of Levitation, everyone. Everyone, Cloak.”

“I can tell there’s a story there,” Pepper said, “but it’s for a different time. We’re talking about non-sequential neurons or something along those lines.”

“Right.” Tony shook himself, looking back at Vision. Too many personalities in one room—he was out of practice. “What all that jargon meant was that you’re trillions of neurons, and only some of them are the Mind Stone. If we can separate them… there’s still a whole lot of  _ you  _ left.”

Something like relief, like hope, sparked in Vision’s golden eyes. “How would you do that?”

“Do you have anything that precise?” Strange asked.

Tony smirked, lifting his chin, even as he sat on the edge of the coffee table before Vision. “I can make something that is.”

* * *

 

Peter was speaking before his mind had quite caught up with his words. “It wouldn’t have to be precise.”

There was a deafening rustle as everyone shifted their positions to look at him. Peter’s mouth flopped for a moment, and he looked involuntarily left to where Stark was roosting. 

“Do explain,” Strange called. It could have been condescending—that’s what Peter would have expected—but there was instead an amused curiosity in the wizard’s tone.

“You’d, uh, need ultraprecision to separate Stone-connected neurons from the larger tetrahedral matrix,” Peter continued.

“Which could only be accomplished by a focused photon stream.” Stark nodded.

“Moving away from lightsabers,” Strange contributed, “it would involve a suspended skull exposure, which can do significant damage if not operated properly and cleanly.”

“Right,” Peter said, scooching forward. “But Vision’s not any ordinary brain, he’s special.” Peter shot the android a smile, continuing, “like Mr. Stark said, the synaptic connections were coded. If you could translate the neurons into nonphysical data, adjust them within a hologram or on a screen, and rework the fastenings between Stone and mind—”

“The actual surgery would be foolproof,” Strange finished. 

“Could be done like selective laser sintering.” Stark had stood up, eyes flashing with excitement. “That’s good, that’s very good.”

Peter’s cheeks heated, and he glanced down at his ankles, smiling.

“The mind provides more than just thought and personality, though,” Strange said. “Once you remove the Stone, the source of power and organization for the whole body would be lost. You’d have to replace it with a machine capable of producing, nonstop, the potential electrostatic force of fourteen and a half  _ million  _ volts per meter.”

Peter looked to Stark, waiting for his answer, but the man didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, he peered at Strange, brows knitted like he was trying to identify a particularly unusual bacterial colony on the edge of a petri dish.

Strange stared right back.

“How do you know the average bioelectric output of a human brain and the calculations necessary to reevaluate the power potential in a mechanical neuron?” Stark finally asked.

Strange shrugged. “I’m a neuroscientist.”

“I repeat, calculations necessary to reevaluate the power potential in a mechanical neuron.”

Someone coughed in that explicitly awkward way that meant they were covering a laugh. Peter glanced over and saw Pepper frantically staunching a smile next to Rhodes’ shaking shoulders. 

“I can extrapolate from base neuron counts and multiply in scientific notation. It’s not rocket science,” Strange said, clasping his hands behind him again. 

“I beg to differ,” May muttered. 

“Whatever, wizard.” Stark waved a dismissive hand, but there was a bit of a grin on his face. “Creating an output of 14.5 million volts is the easy part.”

He stood, stretching his arms above his head and readjusting his rumpled clothing. Peter sought out the tell-tale signs of the bandages, which were still mostly intact as far as Peter could tell. 

“No time to waste, then,” Stark said. “Parker, you’re with me.”

Peter straightened. “What?”

“You. In the workshop. With me. We’ve gotta figure out how to transfer neurological signals into computer code without blacking out New York.”

“Oh, uh, right,” Peter stuttered, surging to his feet. 

“The rest of you—” Stark waved his hands around the room as though conducting— “continue with whatever enterprises are prudent for your own continued existence.”

And then he turned and strode from the room without another word. 

Peter glanced at May, who mimed applause, and Loki, who looked pleased. “Go on,” his brother in arms hissed. “Go save the world.”

Peter bounced off after Stark, high-fiving his aunt as he went and screeching into a sprint as soon as he made it into the hallway. His steps pattered on the carpeted ground as he chased Tony’s shadow down the Compound. 

Stark was walking backwards when Peter caught up with him. He grinned when Peter fell into step, saying, “ever been in my workshop?”

Peter shook his head mutely. He held his hands somewhat awkwardly before them, caught between wringing them with nervousness and tapping them on his thighs in excitement. 

“You’ll love it,” Stark assured, gripping Peter’s shoulder.

Three twists of the hallway later, they’d halted before a gleaming panel of the compound wall. Tony braced his hands against one edge, and FRIDAY’s voice leapt out into the air around them.

“Access confirmed,” she said. “Welcome back, boss.”

“Thanks FRI.” Tony lifted his eyes to the ceiling, and Peter caught a glimpse of the protective, genuine smile that dusted his face. It was shockingly, unimaginably different from the sharp grin Peter had always seen before, and it changed the man’s entire manner. 

Somewhere in the back of Peter’s mind, he wondered if that smile would ever be directed at him. 

Stark slipped behind the panel as it slid open, and Peter went to follow him. As he crossed the threshold, a flash of light crossed his skin and FRIDAY spoke again. 

“Access confirmed,” she said. “Welcome home, Peter Parker.”

But Peter hardly heard her. 

Because spread out, here in front of him in a swath of light and sound, was the most beautiful room he’d ever seen.

Silver and red, gold and brown, the workshop spiraled through the well-lit space in an abstract array of projects. Tables slotted over stacked drawers, wheels sliding easily on smooth concrete tiles. Warm blue light from hanging holoscreens illuminated sheets and shards of metal where they nested. Canisters clung efficiently to the wheeled power tools dragged to needed locations around the room, though the extension cords were irrevocably tangled across the floor. 

Peter ran his hand across a wire shelving unit pressed to the wall, fingers traveling up to the glass drawers it held and the light that shone from within them. His fingers found the grooves of buttons.

As he moved, a gleam off the next wall caught his eye. Peter swung out into the space, pivoting around himself, spinning to try and take in everything. He could see movement, robotic arms ticking away toward objects obscured by screens. Hardly any space was wasted—Peter could identify curls of metal hanging from the roof, bits of machines suspended so one could access the wires inside. 

The whole place was saturated with invention, practically  _ painted  _ with innovation. With the tools, the materials… Peter could build anything, everything. Any thought of impossibility, of laws and budget and rationality, couldn’t so much as nest in his mind as design and problem and calculation replaced everything. 

It was magnificent. 

“Good, isn’t it? It’s still a bit disorganized from the move, but not for long.” 

Stark was leaning against the arm of a whirring robot, legs crossed, smirk shining with something proud and comfortable. Even bandaged, even in hospital clothing, he looked at home in the space. He was a part of it, an irrevocable one, as well-placed and essential as the—

“Is that a stereolithograph?” Peter gasped.

Stark nodded, pushing away from his perch. “The best.”

“And that’s—that’s a scanning probe microscope! How’d you get one so small?”   

“Built it,” Stark replied. He pointed. “That’s the first iteration in the corner there. No, don’t look, it’s a mess.”

“Who-ho-ho- _ hoa!”  _ Peter yelped, vaulting across the room to the whirring arms in the back. “Is this—”

“Nanotech,” Stark agreed. “The Wakandan outreach center outfitted me with some new fingertip synthesizers.”

Peter gaped. “Are they…”

“They are.”

It was an effort to contain his squeal. “Vibranium in your suit! Yes!” Peter moved closer to the nanotech synthesis, trying to see what they were working on. “Fully adaptable, completely flexible in weapon and form—”

He broke off, watching the regular movements of the arms as they arranged their particles over the base surface. It was as smooth as painting. 

“Those aren’t your colors?” Peter observed as he watched navy streaks appear.

“Nope.” Stark had come up next to him, stuffing his hands into his pockets. “They’re yours.”

Peter stared at him. 

And kept staring. 

“What?”

“It’s a darker blue, I know, but the nanotech is metallic and I personally dislike that effect on blue. I can change it if you prefer.” Stark indicated the screen beside him, which displayed an enhanced image of the individual nanoparticles and their arrangement. Peter could see how they’d shift and slide between and over each other for extreme mobility; more like cloth instead of metal.

A spider-suit. 

“For…” he stuttered, “for me?”  
“Yup,” Stark said, flicking one of the arms and turning away. 

“I don’t—I don’t understand—” Peter was stuck, frozen to the concrete floor, shock bitter on his tongue. “Is it—”

“Kid,” Stark said. That hand found Peter’s shoulder again. “Updating a suit is normal.”

“But I…” Peter swallowed, forcibly stepping back from the nanotech. “I’m not…”

Stark looked at him, a flicker of a smile on his face. It took too much effort for Peter to meet his eyes.

“Thank you,” Peter finally voiced, lifting his chin slightly.

“My pleasure, kid.” Stark’s hand patted his shoulder once before retreating back to his side. “Now let’s get to work.”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw look they're bonding. *dreamy sigh*


	55. Attempting Politeness

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: *feels insecure about writing skills and the ever-increasing length of fic*  
> My subconscious: You know what we should do to cope with this? WRITE MORE
> 
> So here's this early-morning product of my homework procrastination and dissociation. Enjoy! XD

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

As though Stark and Peter had been the knot of the group, with them gone, it wasn’t long before Loki and the rest drifted back to their own individual projects. Ms. Potts was the first to extricate herself, followed by the aunt and Colonel Rhodes and Vision. Happy had disappeared long before. 

Loki was perfectly fine with this, as the couch grew slowly more available and he grew slowly more horizontal. He stretched out on his back, head scrunched on the armrest of the sofa, and stared at the sentient ceiling with all the intensity of a predator. 

He couldn’t see the wizard, but he could sense him. Strange’s presence lingered behind Loki, prickling at the back of his neck, itching his hands into fists.

Rationality said Loki’s anger at the man was unjustified and counterproductive. Strange hadn’t even met him, let alone had the experiences that had prompted him to make the world-altering decision he had made many years in the future. Rationality said  _ this  _ Strange hadn’t fucked Loki over,  _ this  _ Strange hadn’t stolen him from his family and his people,  _ this  _ Strange hadn’t rendered him unable to stop his brother’s screams.

Rationality said a lot of things.

Loki’s gut just kept chanting  _ ‘stab him.’ _

He shuffled up the couch, letting his head flop over the armrest so he could survey the wizard, upside-down. Strange didn’t so much as look at him. 

Actually, as far as Loki could tell, Strange wasn’t looking at anything. His hands were twisting before him—not in a magical way, but in a normal, fidgeting sort of way—and his gaze tracked toward nothingness in the upper corner of the wall.

Loki flipped onto his stomach, slightly intrigued. 

“Strange?”

“Hm?” The man’s head drifted in Loki’s direction, generally unbothered.

Loki didn’t answer, dismissing the interaction. He swung his legs over to push himself upright and stood from the couch. Straightening his tunic, he fingered the lump that was the Stone, and the list beside it. 

Part of him wanted to find where Stark and Peter had stowed themselves, but the majority of him knew not to interfere. This was a necessary development as far as trust went. 

_ You already interfered,  _ whispered that voice in the back of his mind.  _ You told him what things were like in your universe. You told him ‘son’. _

But then, perhaps that interference, the little seed of thought he may have planted in Peter’s mind in the heat of that argument, was just what the boy needed. Perhaps.

Or perhaps he’d ruined another chance, hindered a relationship that could have, should have, been so easy.

Grimacing, Loki shook himself. His skin itched, and he imagined shrinking a furry feline’s body, dropping into a coiled snake’s, or rising on onyx raven’s wings. But Strange was watching him with a detached interest. Loki elected to stride from the room instead, making a beeline for the nearest door. 

He didn’t stop walking for a long while, stalking through the halls and rooms of the Compound. He wasn’t sure when his movements became a wander, but eventually that’s all they were. Smooth tile floors, lush carpet, and even the sproingy, dry, November grass of the lawn met his footsteps as he moved. He had no goal, just thoughts, and they swirled in incomprehensible hurricanes until he’d nearly transversed the whole Compound.

And then he smelled meat.

The scent wasn’t particularly strong, but it was definitely out of place. Loki stopped in his tracks, something inside him tugging. Then growling.

He turned his head toward the smell, drawing in a long breath. His feet, already used to wandering, drew around the next curl of the Compound almost against his will. But he didn’t have anything to do, anywhere to be. 

And he was  _ hungry,  _ Odin-damn it.

So Loki followed his nose into the sprawling Compound kitchen, marveling at the way the atmosphere changed from professional yet comfortable to homey yet expansive. 

The sole occupant of the kitchen looked up on his arrival. “Loki Odinson,” Vision said, his hands pausing where they were plunged deep into a bowl. 

Loki’s eyes flicked to the Mind Stone, then aggressively away. “Greetings,” he replied.

Vision went back to his kneading, concentration evident on his humanoid face. “What brings you here?”

Loki chose honesty; it was simplest. “The smell. What are you making?”

Lifting a hand coated in powder and clumps of dough out of the bowl, Vision pointed toward the stove. “Meat pie,” he explained. “Sausage.”

Loki perked up, moving forward a bit. “Really?”

The android nodded. “The crust is going well, and I’m almost done cooking up the meat. I’ll have to do the rest of the filling, though. Not sure what to put with pork.”

Loki slid through the room, making his way to the popping, sizzling pan resting on the stove burner. The meat inside was minced and browning, and it looked simply delicious. Unable to resist, Loki pinched a piece, tossing it into his mouth.

“Mmm,” he said. “That’s good.”

“Thank you.” Vision had turned his crust out onto the counter and was covering it in another layer of flower.

The savory taste of the sausage hung in Loki’s mouth as his mind began to race. 

“Tang,” he declared after a moment. “Tang, salt, and smooth.”

Vision paused, glancing up at Loki questioningly, but the god didn’t notice. He was spinning across the kitchen, opening every cabinet he passed, fingers flying over their contents. Opening something white and smooth, Loki was hit with a blast of cool air—he paused before the ingredients within.

There were bottles nestled on the door, containing various liquids. Loki hoped they weren’t all fermented as he lifted some at random from the shelves.

“Loki,” Vision called as Loki tested the scent of each. “What are you doing?”

“Finding the right…” Neither of these. Loki took another set. “... sauce.”

Three containers of various size and material later, saliva pooled under Loki’s tongue at the scent of the one in his hand. He dripped a drizzle of the liquid inside onto the inside of his cheek, and nodded.

“Tang,” he said by way of explanation. Vision caught the bottle as Loki flipped it to him, leaving flowery handprints where his maroon hands connected with it.

Closing the door, Loki spun to the next cabinet. The small jars and their powdered contents looked promising; Loki began his search.

“Worcestershire sauce?” Vision read off the label.

“Is that what it is?”

Loki flew through the spices; sniffing, tasting, touching. A small row accumulated on the counter next to him as he found ones he liked, but nothing certain just yet. Behind him, Vision was watching him and rolling out dough simultaneously. Loki had to admire the android’s coordination.

“There it is,” Loki said in triumph, screwing the lid back onto the spice in his hand. 

He sauntered over to the island where Vision was working, holding out the container. Halfway through his rolling, Vision didn’t take it immediately. He worked the dough for a moment longer, then folded it in thirds and carefully transferred it to a pre-cut square of some thin, clear material.

“Could you put that in the fridge?” the android asked.

Loki cocked his head.

“Chill it,” Vision clarified.

Loki spun back to the white machine he’d found his sauce in and did as he was bid. When he turned back, Vision was sniffing at the spice.

“Chutney,” he observed. “Good choice.”

Staring for a moment at the sauce, Vision looked at Loki sharply, excited. “I know! Parsley. The parsley would be fantastic with this.”

Loki couldn’t say he knew what that was, but he read labels and bottles until he found something that matched the description. A quick inhale confirmed the android’s hypothesis. He set the little jar next to its companions, then stepped back with a pleased sort of smirk.

He realized what he’d done a few seconds later. 

Attempting politeness, Loki gestured to the spices. “Suggestions,” he said. “My apologies.”

“No, no,” Vision assured. “I… appreciate it. I didn’t realize you cooked.”

Loki shrugged. “Not excessively. I’ve simply always been good at meat pie.”

Vision smiled. “Is there a story there, pray tell?”

Loki looked down at his hands, forcibly stopping them from wringing. “Well…they were easy to eat and clean to take with you. Even princes need lunch on their adventures.” 

“Indeed,” Vision chuckled. “Though I suppose you cooked with mutton instead of sausage.”

Loki shrugged an affirmation. “Your earth-meat is still quite good.”

“Better, with your contribution.” Vision smiled, the Stone in his forehead pulsing slightly. “I still need to cut pie crust squares and simmer veggies. And season.” He gestured to the sauce and spices. “If you’d like…”

The air tasted of flower and oil and spice, and Loki nodded.

“I’d like to help you finish,” he said, his smirk shifting to something genuine. “I’d like that very much.”

* * *

 

Tony’s cheek scrunched up in his hand as he glared at the translucent screens before him, concentration wrinkling his nose. Code flickered like a candle across the surface. He categorized most of it as unhelpful; even if it was the proper substitute for what the inside of Vision’s mind would look like, it wasn’t anything encouraging.

“I think we need a different platform,” he said out of the side of his mouth that wasn’t pressed into his palm.

“Hm?” The kid looked up from where he was exploring the back side of the workshop.

Tony pushed himself around in his wheeling chair, catching the top of his toe against the concrete floor as a break. “Our original manipulation code doesn’t interact with the insert material.”

“What if… you rewrote the acceptance data—”

“As a substitution program? Already done.” Tony huffed. “That got me closer, but the two still don’t mesh correctly.”

Peter grimaced, both in thought and in sympathy. Tony saw something tap in his hands, a low  _ thunk thunk thunk  _ drifting through the room: a pencil.

“What are you doing over there?” he inquired. 

“Oh, uh,” the kid stuttered. The tapping sound, thankfully, ceased. “I was just thinking that if the Time… uh, Gem? Yeah, Gem. Anyway, if it’s as dangerous as Mr. Doctor Strange says, I figure we should have something more substantial to contain it than a woven yarn sack.”

“First of all,” Tony began, holding up a finger, “do not call him ‘Mr. Doctor Strange’. You get one title. Pick one and stick with it.”

Peter nodded emphatically, but Tony could see the whisper of a grin across his face. Not for one second did he buy the innocent act.

“And second of all, that’s a solid plan.” Tony spun in the chair, two complete circles. His gaze snagged on the diagrams still open on a holoscreen in one corner—he’d need to build another suit as well. The two most recent iterations had been destroyed one after the other, and he was not fighting an alien warlord with an old prototype. 

But that wasn’t important right now. “What material are you thinking of?” he asked Peter.

“Not sure yet? I’m mostly playing with design.”

Tony nodded. “You should ask the wizard how he keeps his. Don’t reinvent the wheel and all that.”

“Yessir.”

“Alright, I’m gonna rework the base code here. Carry on.” He spun back toward the screens before Peter could respond, and it wasn’t long before the skritching of a pencil could be heard from behind him. Tony smiled slightly. 

Working with the kid was… a joy. Tony didn’t usually have help when he tinkered or coded or designed, and doing so with someone who actually understood what he was creating was undeniably wonderful. Even just this, working side-by-side on separate but related problems had a different and better atmosphere. 

As he set his hands back to the code, Tony allowed himself to hope there’d be more moments like this, before the world had to end. 

It tended to do so at the drop of a hat. But it hadn’t yet; this boy was proof. 

Focusing back on the problem at hand, Tony kept a screen open to the view from the side of the workshop so he could keep an eye on the kid. Peter hummed as the numbers spiderwebbed from beneath the pencil in his hand. Tony joined in unconsciously, his keystrokes speeding to match the beat.

Dum-E whirred in the corner, watching the nanotech bots synthesize their personality-less load. Dangling cords brushed against Tony’s shin when he crossed his legs. FRIDAY popped occasional updates onto the margins of his screens, and Tony’s surveillance of the Asgardian indicated he’d found his way into the kitchen with Vision. 

They worked in companionable silence for a while. Code began to interact proportionally on Tony’s screen, and he grew slowly more enthusiastic. While one hand entered yet another string of calculations, Tony reached up to pull down another window and have FRIDAY begin rendering the replacement arc reactor.

Peter had changed his song at some point, and Tony had lost the tune. He picked it back up when it lifted into the idiosyncratic jingle of the Star Wars theme.

Hum, type, swipe. The rhythm was familiar and comforting.

“Why did you lie?”

Tony didn’t give himself time to second-guess the question. He just asked, in the pause of the screens and the retard of the stupid theme-song.

Peter looked up quickly. Tony didn’t turn.

“Why did you lie?” he said again. 

“I…”

“About Loki. Why did you lie for three and a half weeks?”

SIlence, for a long, bitter moment. Code was still filtering across the holoscreens, but Tony wasn’t reading it.

“I wanted to tell you,” Peter finally said. “But I… I was scared. And I thought… I don’t know.”

“What?” Tony pressed, caught between whirling toward the boy and just staring at the transparent blue light before him. “You could have fooled me that anything resembling thinking was going on.”

“I just—I didn’t know if you’d believe me. Loki doesn’t even seem—he’s changed, but you wouldn’t have seen it that way, and you’d have been right, but I couldn’t… I was afraid you’d try and kill him.”

Tony closed his eyes. “You almost killed—”

“You, I know,” Peter interrupted, and Tony could hear the shame in his voice, “and I did kill those weapon’s dealers in the warehouse—”

“Yourself.”

Peter’s words stopped in a sudden, choking silence.

“You almost died,” Tony said again. “Because I didn’t… because…”

“No.” Peter spoke before Tony could find the explanation he sought. “I almost died, and you almost died, and those men… they died because I screwed up. Because me and Loki have a single brain cell shared between us and neither of us remembered to use it. Because we fucked up so royally we  _ decimated an industry _ .”

“Language,” Tony snorted, so much that he didn’t say. 

“Yeah,” Peter sighed. 

Tony hooked his ankle around the axle of the spinney chair and turned to look at the at the boy. He was closer than Tony had thought. 

“I know you don’t trust me.” Peter’s voice was certain, despite the wobble of youth and emotion within it. 

“I don’t,” Tony agreed, because he wouldn’t lie to the boy. Not about this. “But I believe you.”

Peter nodded once, and Tony saw his fingers twitch as if to reach for his web-shooters. Tony’s own hands slid toward the sunglasses in his back pocket. 

“I know,” Peter said with a flicker of a smile.

Both of them turned back to their projects with a swallow and a nod, pretending that was enough. 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aw look, they're bonding even more... *dreamy sigh*


	56. Immensity of the Problem

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

The first sign that reached Tony to indicate the passage of time was Peter falling asleep on the back table. The second was Rhodey’s somewhat aggressive entrance.

“Hey, Platypus,” Tony said, glancing up at his friend from where he sat hunched over a now-horizontal screen. 

“As I am under no illusions that you know the time,” Rhodey replied. “I’ll just tell you. It’s 1:30”

Tony nodded, a bit surprised. “Nice. Not even two o’clock yet!”

“You’re injured.”

“And making progress.” Tony beckoned Rhodey over. “The kid’s smart; this method is far more efficient than trying to mechanize an android laser surgery.” 

Rhodey leaned against the side of Tony’s chair, hand settling on Tony's shoulder as he craned to see the screen in front of the engineer. The blue light cast his face in severe shadow, but his presence was warm.

“Good, I think?” Rhodey chuckled. “But speaking of the kid, where is he?”

Tony looked over his shoulder, shrugging out of Rhodey’s hold so he could point behind him. 

Peter had his head pillowed on his forearms, face turned to the side, cheek scrunched into his wrist. His curls flopped over his ears and onto his forehead, and his hands were hidden in the shadows under his chin. A sweatshirt had been tucked up around his shoulders. It’s hood piled on his neck and fluffed the shorter hair at the nape of his skull. Tony hadn’t been able to get it to stay over his head; the boy had mumbled and swiped at Tony’s hands when he’d tried to do so.

Rhodey smiled softly at the sight. “Well, I’ll tell his aunt he’s fine.”

“Oh, shit.” Tony sat up, rubbing his face. “I forgot about that.”

“She was mostly just concerned he’d be a bother tomorrow if he was sleep-deprived. I told her we were used to it.” 

“Hm,” Tony said. Peter huffed a particularly deep release of breath, shifting a bit on the desk. The hood flopped off, lying on the kid’s elbow.

“We need to talk,” Rhodey said suddenly. 

Tony glanced at him, clasping his hands on his knees. “Oh?”

“The Accords.”

Right.

Another dose of reality slammed into Tony like a brick wall, pulling a sigh from his lips and an exhaustion into his bones. Tony’s hands traveled up to his temples. “I know,” he said. “I’m…”

Rhodey blew out a breath, pulling up a wheeling chair and slumping down next to Tony. They stared at nothingness together for a long moment. With a quiet whir, Tony heard a nanobot run out of power and shut down, heard the others shift to continue the work without faltering. Efficient. Easy. 

“I wouldn’t bring it up at such a bad time,” Rhodey began, “if I knew…  _ anything  _ about what we are to do next.”

“Vision. Saving Vision is what we’re doing next.”

“You know as well as me that it’s not that simple.” Rhodey sighed, head dropping back over the edge of his seat. “It’ll take time, and it won’t be foolproof. And after? What the  _ hell  _ do we do after?”

Tony tapped his fingers on the desk, minimizing his holoscreen so the code didn’t draw his attention from his friend. “We start looking for the other Stones.”

“Where? How? You can’t build a spaceship that can transverse the  _ universe  _ out of the tech in this room, Tony. You can do a lot of things, but you can’t do that. It takes…  _ years  _ to even get to Mars at the speeds we know. And where do we even look? Where do we wander? This universe is immense, unquantifiable.”

“Don’t remind me,” Tony groaned. “You’re right, I know. But I can use more than what’s in this room. We’ve got a head start; we’ve got alien tech in the vault. I could search and begin work on something…”

“Something light speed?”

“Something faster,” Tony admitted. “It sounds impossible, I know—”

“Tony, if there’s anything I know about you, it’s that impossible turns tail and  _ runs  _ when you rear your head.” Rhodey smiled. “It’s the timeline that I’m worried about. And more than that… you’d use tech from Damage Control. Which is fine; you’re a joint owner and that’s all legal. But the government will want to know why to keep SHIELD off your back.”

“And to do that…”

“You have to explain to the Accords council.” Rhodey nodded. “I’m not saying we shouldn’t explain—God knows I’m not saying that. But…”

“Loki,” Tony finished.

“Loki,” Rhodey agreed. “And we just, fuck, we just ran into a  _ wizard.  _ And we’re about to eliminate the power of one of the only remaining Avengers—for the good of the universe, but still. Say they let you do it without argument, say we go to space without conflict…. Who’s going to protect the Earth while we scour the stars?”

Tony groaned, hands fisting in his hair. It wasn’t that he hadn’t thought about these questions, but hearing them aloud, all at once, brought the immensity of the problem into perspective. Two Stones, they had two; and a world of conflict to reach the other four. And the Gem… Tony didn’t know what to think about the Gem. 

“And then there’s  _ that,”  _ Rhodey continued, spinning around to point at the unconscious boy in the corner. 

Tony followed his gaze. He couldn’t help but smile slightly at how Peter’s face had disappeared into the crook of his arms, only his puff of hair visible. 

“What about that?” Tony joined Rhodey in pointing.

“I’m just… he’s fifteen,” Rhodey sighed. “He’s still in high school. He’s only here because it’s a weekend.”

“Yeah,” Tony murmured.

“But can you imagine… getting on a spaceship? With Loki and Strange and whoever else?” Rhodey looked at Tony, who didn’t quite meet his eyes. “And getting him to stay behind?”

_ ‘Stay away from the flying Vulture guy, okay?’ _

_ ‘But I’m ready for more than that now!’ _

Tony rubbed his face harder, trying to find an answer—any answer—to that question.   

_ ‘When you can do the things that I can, but you don't, and then the bad things happen… they happen because of you.’ _

No. No he couldn’t imagine that.

Tony crossed his legs, then uncrossed them when the awkward support of the spinney chair became uncomfortable. The fabric itched at his shoulders. His fingers were still tapping, increasing in speed, and Rhodey covered them with a gentle hand. 

“Hey, hey,” his friend said. “I shouldn’t… we should both be asleep—”

“No, it’s alright.” Tony stood, stretching his arms above his head. “We need to figure it out—all this shit.” 

Rhodey rubbed his legs, fingers catching on the edges of his braces. He said, “but we don’t have to do it now.”

“We do.” Tony offered him a hand, and a grin. “Cuz there’s no way in hell I’m sleeping now.”

“Fine, fine,” Rhodey laughed. “I couldn’t either, so. But I do need coffee.”

“Yes, coffee,” Tony agreed. “Coffee and help.”

“Help?”

Tony moved toward the back of the room, sliding between the edge of a table and a rolling cart and making his way to Peter. His footsteps must’ve been loud in the boy’s enhanced ears, for he shifted and mumbled something, shoulders hunching. Tony slowed so he didn’t surprise the kid.

“Yeah, help,” he murmured. 

“Elaborate.”

“I still haven’t gotten a good look at the names on Loki’s list.” Tony shrugged. “I know I’m probably not going to like what I see, but at least I’ll know where to start.”

“I… okay, yeah, that’s actually a good idea,” Rhodey sighed, hands clasping at the back of his head. “There’s more to this quest than just the Stones.”

“There’s a lot more to this quest,” Tony agreed. 

He turned his attention to the dozing Peter, moving up next to him. Carefully lifting the oversized hoodie from where he’d tucked it over the boy, Tony draped it across his shoulder and laid a hand between the kid’s shoulder blades. 

“Wakey wakey, Underoos,” Tony called softly. “Let’s get you somewhere more comfortable while me and Rhodey panic, shall we?”

Peter mumbled, curling his spine and pressing into Tony’s hand, a bit like a cat. The man chuckled. 

“I promise you’ll thank me tomorrow when you’re entire body doesn’t ache like a sonofabitch.”

Peter raised his head, blinking blearily. “Cuzawha?”

“Be _ cause—”   _ Tony stressed the last syllable— “my lab is comfortable, but not that comfortable.”

“Hm. Mr. St’rk,” the boy observed. He was looking at Tony through squinted eyelids, and it was undeniably adorable.

“That’s me.” Tony gripped Peter’s upper arm, helping him to his feet. “Up we go.”

Peter stretched, vertebrae popping, then slouched off after Tony as he started for the door. “What time is’t?” he mumbled.

“Late,” Tony said at the same moment Rhodey called, “early.”

Peter blinked. 

“Don’t think too hard about it,” Tony advised, holding in a sort. 

“Whatever you say.” Peter yawned. 

Tony met Rhodey’s eyes, wheezing slightly as he clenched every muscle in his jaw and neck to keep from laughing. The colonel was grinning like a madman, and he mouthed something Tony didn’t quite catch. 

Rhodey fell into step behind them as Peter and Tony slunk out of the room. Peter was looking at his feet, seemingly bothered by the light, and FRIDAY obligingly darkened areas of the hallway as they passed. Leading them out and into the small wing of guest quarters in the main Compound building, Tony kept an eye out for signs of their other invited intruders and chaos-causers. 

He let Peter into the first empty room he found; the boy was asleep on his feet again. Peter flopped onto the bed with a pleased little sigh, burrowing his head under the pillow and twisting the covers around him. 

He looked so small. 

“Thanks,” Peter mumbled, eyes already closed. 

“No problem, kid,” Tony replied, smiling from where he was leaning against the doorframe. 

Peter didn’t speak again, and Tony nodded, stepping out of the room and closing the door. “FRIDAY?” he said.

“I’ll keep you updated, boss.”

“Thanks my girl.”

FRIDAY flickered the lights, and Tony trotted back to where Rhodey was waiting. 

“So,” the man said. “That was slightly hilarious.”

“He’s a good kid,” Tony agreed, lifting both hands in surrender as he glanced back at the closed door. 

“Definitely the most smartest of us.”

Tony snorted. “That. And also the dumbest. It’s an ongoing war in his teenage mind.”

As one, Rhodey and Tony turned to make their way back through the Compound. The windows opened onto the dark lawn and shadowed sky, and Tony walked close to them, trying to see through his reflection in the glass. It took every ounce of his self control not to reach out a hand to trail along the surface. 

“FRIDAY, what’s the status on Loki?” Rhodey asked. “Is he asleep?”

“I do not believe so,” replied the ceiling, sounding thoughtful. “He’s in the kitchen.”

Rhodey and Tony shared a glance, and then a shrug.

“What about the wizard?” Tony inquired after a beat.

“Doctor Strange has returned to his Sanctum. He left a parting message, however, assuring you that he’d still be awake and does have a working cell-phone, though you would have to contact him over WiFi as the signal is ‘disrupted by concentrated magical signatures.’”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Of course he did. Did he say what the number or email to use was?”

“He did not. He did, however, say that if you couldn’t figure out how to contact him, he’d eat his sling-ring.”

“What’s that?” Tony’s brow furrowed.

“I’m unsure, boss,” FRIDAY replied. “I believe it’s necessary for some of the magical functions he performs, though I could be wrong.”

“Right.” Tony nodded. “Thanks for that. Would you mind tracking down his phone and email for me?”

“Right away, boss,” FRIDAY said, somehow managing to sound amused.

“And don’t tell him it was you.”

“Of course.”

Tony looked back at Rhodey, ignoring the man’s pointed grin. “The wizard does not get to judge me for how I get things done.”

“Alright, alright,” Rhodey said, lifting his hands. “I won’t mention it.”

Tony elbowed him, then continued through the hallway with brisk steps. “I’m counting on it. Now let’s go find that Asgardian.”

Getting to the kitchen didn’t take long, and Rhodey and Tony could hear voices long before they saw the light streaming out of the room’s open door.

“These aren’t the same,” Loki’s voice hummed, sounding a little disappointed. “They aren’t as tangy.”

“Should we have used more cinnamon?” That sounded like Vision. Tony sped his pace, now confused as much as he was concerned. 

“Perhaps. And I don’t recognize this substance; it may make a difference.”

“We could try another recipe,” Vision suggested. “I’m sure there’s a different one in practically every book.”

Tony and Rhodey turned into the kitchen’s hallway. They could see shadows moving through the beam of light through the door, one with hair and the other with a cape.

Tony wasn’t sure precisely what he thought he’d see when he turned into the kitchen. Whatever it was, it wasn’t an android and an Asgardian sitting on the island counter side-by-side, munching on cookies and surrounded by what looked to be cooling meat pies. 

It stopped him in his tracks.

Glancing between him and Rhodey, Vision and Loki looked up upon their arrival. One smiled, the other glowered.

“Hello, Mr. Stark, Colonel Rhodes,” Vision said, waving the hand with the cookie in it. “Isn’t it rather late?”

“Um, yeah…” Tony turned, staring at the happy, organized mess of the kitchen around him. “I could say the same to you two.”

“We were occupied,” Loki huffed.

“Would you like a snickerdoodle?”

Vision held out a disk of pastry, cocking his head in a bit of a grin. Tony saw flower smeared across his chin, and couldn’t help but chuckle. 

“Sure,” he said, taking the cookie. “Thanks.”

“Me too, me too!” Rhodey laughed, swiping one before Vision could offer him.

“You should eat a meat pie, too,” Vision said, looking Tony up and down. “I don’t think you’ve eaten proper since this morning, and you’re still injured.”

“Not really,” Tony replied for what felt like the thousandth time. “The nanobots are  _ quite efficient.  _ I’m fine.”

“But eat a pie anyway,” Loki snapped. “They’re good.”

The ridiculousness of the words mixed with the tone of fucking  _ Loki of Asgard  _ called a bark of amusement from Tony. “Sure,” he managed. “Did you make them?”

“Sausage and zucchini and onion.” Loki was still glowering. 

“And chutney and Worcestershire sauce,” Vision added. 

Tony and Rhodey shared another look. 

“How can I resist,” Tony eventual said, reaching for one of the pies. They did look quite good.

“Why are you here?” Loki demanded, though he settled onto the counter as though getting comfortable.

“I wanted a look at the list.” Tony got straight to the point. “There’s a few more issues we have to figure out.”

“A lot of issues,” Rhodey said. “But the best way to start tends to be collecting all the available information.”

“Plus it’s making me nervous that we only have one copy.”

The god’s only answer was, “where’s Peter?”

“Asleep,” Tony assured. “In one of the guest rooms. Speaking of, FRIDAY, will you tell May, if she’s awake?”  
“She’s not, but I will alert her when she wakes up.”

Tony gave the ceiling a thumbs-up, then turned back to Loki.

“So, how about it?”

Loki carefully positioned his snickerdoodle on his knee, arranging it perfectly to avoid shedding crumbs, and brushed his hands off on his tunic. He reached into his pocket, and Tony saw the strings of the Gem’s bag before Loki eased the list out. 

Tony pulled up a holoscreen, flipping its projector into the middle of his palm, and swiped the slip of paper from Loki’s slightly hesitant fingers. He scanned the slightly wobbly script into the database even as he read it.

Then stopped. Looked up.

Read it again. 

“This is not a list,” he finally said, looking up at Loki. “This is an  _ incomprehensible spider-web  _ of random organization!”

“I doubt it.” The god shrugged. “Know any of those people?”

“Unfortunately yes,” Tony sighed. He turned his hand so Rhodey could see the names splattered across the paper. 

“What the hell?” Rhodey sighed, brows creasing. “Why the layout…”

“And there’s lines. But not to everyone,” Tony observed. Moving forward, he spread the list out on the counter between Loki and Vision, Rhodey craning over his shoulder. 

“Yes, just between you and Peter. And you and Rogers.” Vision’s slim finger traced the crinkled paper. “Thor and… Bruce? That makes little sense.”

Loki coughed. 

“Oh,” Vision said, finger stilling over another name. “Me and… me and Wanda.”

Tony glanced at the android, who kept his eyes fixed on the paper. His Stone pulsed, and Tony thought it looked almost anxious. Guilty. 

Ashamed.

_ Never be ashamed for falling in love, Vision.  _

But he couldn’t speak those words; not yet. Not in front of others, no matter how well-known. Not until Vision was ready.

So he just put a hand on the androids shoulder and kept talking. 

“FRIDAY,” he said, “how are we on contacting the wizard?”

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> rhOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOODES


	57. Unfortunate Wizard Associate

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things I learned today:  
> One, mindbogglingly is all one word. Who would have thought of it?  
> Two, insouciant is a word apparently. It means 'showing a casual lack of concern'.   
> Woot.
> 
> Anyway! Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Stephen was expecting the call. 

His phone went off with a buzzing vibration that shuddered through the table his physical form was unconscious on, traveling up into the awareness of his astral form. Stephen looked up from his book. On the table, the phone lit up in slow motion, displaying an unknown caller ID.

Stephen slipped down in energy signature until his physical form opened bleary eyes. He reached out an aching, newly bandaged hand and knocked the phone closer to him, fumbling with the buttons for a moment as he tried to answer. Nearly hanging up twice, he managed to turn off the song of the day—now new, as they’d crossed over the midnight mark—and get the phone onto speaker.

“Hello?” he said. 

“Future Strange is being a fucking enigma,” snapped the voice on the other end, wasting no time.

“Good thing you only have to deal with him indirectly,” Stephen drawled. He cupped his chin in his palm and smirked at the phone, hoping Stark could sense the attitude from over the line. 

“Yeah, present Strange isn’t endearing himself to my heart much more effectively. Where have you been?”

Stephen sat back. “Back at my Sanctum. Being genuinely and inarguably productive, unlike a few of you.”

Wong had been reluctant to accept Stephen’s explanation of the sickness of magic, but with proof from the tomes and the support of the Cloak, he’d gotten his point across. Thankfully, the librarian had offered to share the news himself in case Stephen was needed again. Which they’d both known was practically certain.

Stark ignored his comment and said, “how soon can you get here?”

Stephen stood up, slipping the phone into the wraps of his tunic and his sling-ring onto his fingers. Between one beat and the next, he was nearly stumbling over the furniture in the lounge they’d visited that day—the day before, now.  

“I’m already here,” Stephen replied, cedar portal snapping shut. “If you could tell your AI not to shoot me, that would be nice.”

“If FRI finds reason to roast your ass, I’d be inclined to trust her judgement,” Stark sighed. “We’re in the kitchen.”

As though Stephen had any idea where that was, even with the online tour he’d stolen from the internet, Stark hung up. The ceiling, however, was much more obliging, brightening the lights as soon as Stephen gave it—her?—his full attention.

“Hello again, Doctor Strange,” FRIDAY lilted. “If you would follow me.”

Any question on how, exactly, he was expected to follow the ceiling disappeared as a light began to blink further down the hallway. Stephen strode in its direction. Soon after, another light blinked. Stephen’s gait sped as he began to trace FRIDAY’s flickering trail.

Twisting corners and stepping along reflective floor tiles, Stephen couldn’t help but feel like a kid in a supermarket, chasing the reflection of the LEDs above through the long isles. Stephen lengthened his steps in an attempt to try and leap only between the squares perfectly reflecting FRIDAY’s lights. It was noisy, but no one seemed to be around. The Cloak must have realized his little game, and began to lift him slightly in assist.

The walk went remarkably quickly, in that way. 

He turned into the kitchen, snapping instantly back into his calm, collected exterior. Four individuals looked up at him in various states of exhaustion or filth. 

“You called.” Stephen lingered in the doorway. “Literally.”

“Hilarious.” Stark glowered. “We need your help decoding this.”

Stark, Rhodes, Vision, and Loki were all gathered about a scrap of paper unfolded across the counter, and Stephen sidled up between them when Stark beckoned. He peered at the writing on the note, and frowned. 

It was readable. 

Sure, the handwriting was awkward, large in some places and small in others, like a toddler’s first attempt at scribing. But Stephen could understand it with hardly any effort. 

Shaking fingers on his left hand trailed over the bandages across his right. 

How long had it taken future him to create this?

He became conscious of the people watching him again, and straightened quickly. Hands tucked behind his back, he said, “it seems perfectly understandable to me, besides the fact that most of those people are idiots and the rest I’ve never heard of.”

A collective grumble—of disappointment and irritation—hummed through the room. Stark ran a hand through his hair. It must have had grease on it, for the short locks stuck up in haphazard directions when the hand came away. 

“What do you make of the organization, then?” Vision inquired. 

Stephen shrugged, casting his eyes across the paper again. “Clearly, these are a group,” he explained, gesturing to a section of six or so names gathered around the words ‘Peter Quill.’ “I thought of them all at the same time.”

“By that logic, these would be a group,” Stark added, pointing up to the section containing ‘Steve Rogers.’ “But that doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m grouped with them,” Colonel Rhodes interjected. “And I don’t think that’s astonishingly  _ likely.”  _

Stephen shrugged. “Perhaps the few stemming around the Captain are less important, and I thought of them last.”

“Hey.” Stark snapped his gaze to Stephen. “Rude.”

Stephen would have dismissed the hissed words had the man’s gaze not been so intense—looking away was almost impossible in that moment. 

“It is simply a possibility,” Stephen admitted, raising his shaking hands in surrender. 

“Other possibilities, then?” Loki interrupted. Stephen appreciated the attempt to steer them back in the direction of accomplishment.  

Stephen’s eyes danced across the page again, and he hummed. “I wouldn’t have known,” he began, “exactly which individuals were necessary for the accomplishment of your goal, Loki. I think these are less an order and more a starting place.”

“Oh, fantastic,” Stark sighed, looking strangely relieved. 

“Obviously, some seem more likely and essential than others,” Stephen continued, ignoring him. “You. Peter. Steve.”

The relief faded from Stark’s face. 

The names scattered throughout made the paper seem more like a flow chart or a graphic organizer than a true list. Stephen—future Stephen—had scribbled Stark’s name in the center, and spiraled out from there. 

His own name was scrawled in the bottom left corner of the page, it's edges creeping up the sides of the paper in an attempt to fit within the confines. Unconnected to others, it sat solitary. Like an afterthought. 

Stephen turned his gaze elsewhere.

“Perhaps I grouped them by Stone, but that seems unlikely. I doubt I would have known where all of them were located, and who would be required to find each.”

“And gather them.”

Stephen just looked at Stark, expression flat. 

“Look,” Stark sighed. “I understand your hesitance on this. I do. But the universe is the size… it’s mindbogglingly enormous, and I’m sure you’re aware. I can build a ship to get us across it, but not fast enough to find each Stone and then  _ return  _ for them before Thanos begins his conquest in 2018. We’d likely alert him to our presence and jump-start said conquest on the way. There simply…  _ isn’t time.” _

“And I understand that,” Stephen assured. He’d thought this through, and was ready to admit it. “You’re right; I can’t portal safely onto moving objects, so even with quicker transportation… locating and returning for the Stones through repeated space-travel would take time, and a lot of it. But the power of the Stones… the dimensional friction of collecting them would be harmful. No two ways about it.”

“Harmful how?” Vision inquired. “We have two in the room as we speak.”

“Only one from this universe,” Stephen said. He pointed to the Mind Stone. “The other is powerful, but it’s energy comes from elsewhere and as such… doesn’t  _ conflict  _ with what’s emitted by yours, Vision.”

“Alright,” Stark allowed, “so what if we had multiple proper Stones?”

“In all honesty…” Stephen sighed, hand coming up to tap at his chest. “I don’t know. But should we come in contact with them or something touched by their power, we’d be destroyed. We’d become the heart of a reaction that would explode its energy through the universe and alert  _ anyone  _ who happened to be listening. Not just Thanos.”

Stark looked to Rhodes, then to Vision.

“Can we take that risk?” he asked the android.

But it was Stephen who answered. “I think we have to.”

Stark snapped his gaze back, eyebrows raising. “Excuse me? Weren’t you the one who practically roared at us over this?”

Stephen lifted his chin. Conceding a point to this man hurt, but if there was anything Stephen had learned in his life, it was that truth was always, undeniably more important than pride. 

“I was,” Stephen agreed. “But I have been… considering. And I believe you are right.”

* * *

 

Tony gaped at the wizard, undeniably shocked at this point.

“You’re agreeing with him?” Rhodey yelped at the same moment Tony managed, “you’re agreeing with me.”

Strange huffed a slightly embarrassed chuckle, hands sliding into his pockets. “I am.”

That… was that allowed to happen? Were tall, stubborn, capable individuals allowed to change their minds on something they'd been adamant on and…  _ agree  _ with Tony?

Illegal or not, it was happening right in front of him.

“Um,” Tony said articulately. “Great, then. That solves one problem.”

“One problem of  _ many,”  _ Strange sighed.

Tony chuckled darkly. “You can say that again. You, my unfortunate wizard associate—”

“Sorcerer.”

“—have created quite a  _ skew  _ of difficulties I’m going to have to work through.”

Strange smirked, but like seemingly all of the doctor’s expressions, it didn’t quite reach his eyes. Tony might have returned it otherwise. 

“A specialty of mine, I assure you,” the doctor drawled. “Will that be all?”

“What, you busy?” Tony crossed his arms, hands slipping from the list. Loki refolded it behind him, tucking it back with the Stone.

“Yes, actually.” Strange glanced over his shoulder at nothingness, fiddling with something strung across his fingers. It gleamed in the white kitchen light, and Tony turned his attention to it.

There was a strange sort of double-ring across the wizard’s third and fourth fingers, but that wasn’t what had Tony frowning. No, wrapped against the pale skin of Strange’s hands were bandages, nearly hidden within the dark folds of his sleeves. Expertly wrapped, they sheathed each palm and traveled up around the man’s wrists. Tony didn’t remember seeing them before. Though he didn’t remember seeing Strange’s hands much at all: they’d always been in his pockets, behind his back, or gesticulating at unfollowable speeds. 

But he remembered them shaking.

His gaze catching on Tony’s own, Strange slipped his arms to his sides. It could have been an insouciant movement if the wizard’s wrists hadn’t flexed, knocking his cuffs down over his hands. 

Tony’s frown deepened. 

“What sort of… activities does an Earth-sorcerer manage?” Loki asked, leaning down on his knees. Tony looked at him, then sidled out of the way so the Asgardian could have a direct line of sight to the object of his question. 

“Yes, what is it that you do?” Rhodey stepped forward. 

“Besides making balloon animals.”

Strange shot Tony a look, then glanced back at Loki. “Protecting reality, defending the dimension, organizing and cataloging threats of Mystic origin. Which I’ve been behind on, because I’ve been rather distracted by you.” Strange jerked his chin toward Loki.

Loki mimed an exaggerated bow.

“And your Ca—Cloak?” Vision inquired. 

The collars of the Cloak perked up as if recognizing its name. Looking down at it, Strange instantly softened, smirk falling into a whisper of a smile. 

“The Cloak is my loyal companion,” he said, though it was almost more to the garment than the people in the room. “And we’ve been together through thick and thin—haven’t we?”

The Cloak fluttered, collars brushing against Strange’s sharp features, poking against his chin and cheekbones. It was so obviously an affirmative answer that Tony had to smile. 

“It’s a relic containing enough power to manifest a consciousness independent of its form,” Strange explained, looking back up at them. His posture and expression changed instantly, sharpening into the controlled power Tony recognized.

It was as though someone had slid a finger beneath a mask, pulling it up to expose a different face beneath. And the mask had slammed back down, but Tony knew it was there.

And he didn’t trust it.

“Will that be all?” Strange rocked back on his heels. 

Tony waved an expansive hand. “Yes, thanks. You’re dismissed and can return to your balloons.”

Strange rolled his eyes to the heavens. “My most gracious thanks,” he sighed.

His arms appeared from the folds of his Cloak again, reaching forward. The one with the ring flipped itself around, displaying the runes etched into the top of the double-ring, and the other flicked circularly—

Before freezing and dropping back to his side. 

Strange offered no explanation, just spinning and leaving the room in a rustle of fabric, only a slight prickle remaining in the air. Tony didn’t realize he’d tensed defensively until he’d relaxed.

He glanced at Rhodey, puzzled.

“I thought he could do the whole…” Tony mimed magic, which consisted of a lot of flapping about. 

Rhodey shrugged, glancing back at the hallway. There was a slight gleam, a whisper of brownish light, but it was possible Tony was seeing things. 

“I thought so too,” Rhodey said. “Maybe he just… didn’t want to do it in front of us.”

Tony frowned again. 

“I like that man,” Vision observed suddenly.

Everyone spun to look at him in various amounts of surprise. Loki looked almost personally offended, but Vision just shrugged. 

“He seems to be a valuable asset to our mission. And also… a good person.”

Tony didn’t have any evidence to the affirmative or the contrary, so he stayed silent, mind reviewing the conversation. 

“At least he confirmed we didn’t necessarily have to find  _ everyone  _ on that list,” Rhodey sighed. “That might’ve been more impossible than just finding all six Stones.”

Loki hummed. “Something tells me you’ll be running into most of them.”

Tony shot him a look, but didn’t pry, instead glancing up at the ceiling. “FRI, my girl?”

“Yes, boss?” 

“Start a file on these individuals, would you? I want to know everything we can about them.”

FRIDAY flashed the lights. “Can do, boss.”

Giving her a thumbs-up, Tony wandered back to Rhodey’s side. He leaned easily against the man’s side, stretching his arms above his head and yawning. 

“So. Rogers, then,” he said.

“Rogers.”

“Phone now or later?”

Rhodey rubbed his face, slumping back against the counter behind him. “Calling him…”

“Is an explicit breach of Accords.”

Rhodey nodded. “And we still have so much to do in preparation. Vision, a spaceship…”

Tony fiddled with the bottom of his shirt, taking a long breath. The air of the kitchen still smelled of parsley and Worcestershire sauce, and it tingled at the back of his throat like Strange’s aura had. 

“Do you want to start that ball rolling right now? Risk being detained, or worse?” Rhodey tapped his foot, mouth flattened into a thin line as he considered his options. “Do you want to deal with Rogers for long enough to build a spaceship?”

“Easy answer,” Tony said.

“I agree.” Vision murmured, and Rhodey nodded.

“Don’t call him. Not until I’m ready to jump out of the frying pan and into the fire.” Tony yawned, jaw cracking and rubbed his hands through his hair. They were still sticky with grease. 

“I’m afraid I don’t quite follow this decision,” Loki said, raising a hand.

Tony glanced at him. “There was a somewhat extreme falling-out between me and a super soldier. Multiple super soldiers. They absconded to Wakanda and don’t think that I know where they’ve gone. It’s awkward, and I don’t want to repeat any of the previous conversations or arguments.”

“Ah. Peter spoke of this.” Loki nodded. 

“What did he say?” Tony asked, trying to sound nonchalant. Rhodey’s hand found his shoulder.

“Something about regulations and… United Nations Accords.” Loki shrugged. “It was an abbreviated version.”

“Heavily abbreviated,” Tony sighed. 

“I don’t want to hear the rest,” Loki replied flatly. “Please spare me.”

Tony chuckled, raising his hands. “By all means; I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Good.”

“Good.”

They were silent for a long, putrid moment as Tony carefully, expertly swallowed back any sign of emotion, any whisper of energy. The meat pie and cookie churned in his stomach.

It was FRIDAY who broke the silence, sounding a bit embarrassed. “Boss, it is now three in the morning. I’m supposed to instruct you to ‘go to bed you fucking pocket gopher.’”

Silence.

Tony grimaced. “I don’t remember telling you to do that.”

“Which is why I’m still doing it, boss.”

“What even is a pocket gopher,” Tony muttered, straightening from the counter he was leaning against and stretching his arms above his head.

Loki chuckled. “Hell if I know.”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephen only partly a stubborn bastard.


	58. A Hummingbird's Eyes

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just sit back, relax, and let me manipulate your emotions. 
> 
> (Apologies for the lackluster abilities of Google Translate. I don't speak the mentioned language...) 
> 
> Enjoy....?

 

 **Earth-199999:** **_March 16, 2024_ **

 

Pepper Stark knew a great many things.

She knew the color of the sky during each season, the way the angle of the sunrise changed with the tilt of the Earth on its axis. She knew which hours turned the lake to fire. She knew how best to scrub the aforementioned lake’s water out of her carpets when her daughter didn’t take off her shoes and socks. 

The garden in the back was lush and productive; Pepper knew which weeds to pull and bugs to keep, knew each pest by its common and its latin name. After six years of dirt under her fingernails, she knew how short to keep those nails to minimize hassle and discomfort. Tomatoes grew the best by the house and so did the snow peas, but Morgan could reach the latter from her window and would eat down the buds, so Pepper knew to grow them across the yard. 

She knew a thousand acronyms, hidden protocols, tiny references that emerged like spring daisies when she least expected. Not for a moment did Pepper doubt there were more. Scattered around the house, the screens, the Rescue, the little messages called to her some days and destroyed her on others. 

Up to her knees in fresh dirt, Pepper glanced up from her work to check on the girl on the roof. It was early to plant cabbage—Pepper knew this too—but Pepper needed something to do, and was filling the second bed at this point. 

“I don’t like cabbage,” Morgan had told her yesterday over cereal. And the day before that, and the one before that, too.

“Yes, I know.” Pepper had smiled, not looking up from the dishes under her fingers. “But you like coleslaw.”

She remembered how thoughtful the girl had looked. How thoughtful she always looked. 

“Is sauerkraut cabbage too?”

Pepper’d glanced behind her then, nodding. “Indeed it is.”

Cereal today had come and gone without any cabbage conversation. 

Digging her spade in another inch, Pepper listened to the sounds of narration from above her. They were calm and joyous. Pepper knew the tone of excitement and intensity that meant Morgan was getting just a bit too overzealous to be conducting such play on the roof, and needed a change of location.

Pepper knew all of Morgan’s special play zones. She knew the way they shifted with Morgan’s games. Some required she double-knot the girl’s shoes in the morning and some required sandals, and Pepper was always happy to play any necessary character in the unfolding complexities of Morgan’s imagination.

She knew Morgan preferred to direct the stories instead of act in them. She knew Morgan stayed separate; a narrator and not a character. She knew how to read the six-year-old’s spiraling handwriting, each glyph drawn with the utmost painful concentration. She knew Morgan’s usual temperature enough to tell a fever with no tool but her hand. She knew each grin and each playful face, each whine and complaint, the difference between an angry sob and a depressed one. 

Pepper knew that no number, no concept, no description could quantify how much she loved the little girl on that roof. 

Craning over her shoulder again, Pepper watched Morgan balance easily atop the crest of the roof, both hands raised above her. One clutched a leaf, the other a dead computer mouse which Pepper knew was caked with dirt and painted in abstract strokes.

It had been a very long time since Pepper had seen the view from up high. She knew too much, up there. 

 

**_March 23, 2024_ **

Pepper knew to set the table for four every other Saturday. 

It’d gotten less recent lately, from each afternoon to every three days, then once a week, and now their new rhythm. She thought it was a good sign, but she did miss seeing May and her nephew so often.

The lakehouse just felt too empty to Peter, Pepper supposed. She didn’t blame him. 

The doorbell chimed its merry note through the house, followed almost immediately by the patter of Morgan’s excited feet. Pepper craned over the sink, peering onto the porch. 

“Peteo!” Morgan shrieked, and Pepper heard the door fly open.

“Hey Morgoona!” was the reply. Peter sounded weary, but his greeting was joyous. “Good to see you.”

Pepper turned to lean against the edge of the counter as Morgan towed Peter in by his wrist, laughter in the air behind them. 

“Hey Peter,” Pepper said, smiling at him.

“Hi Pepper,” the boy managed between Morgan’s next monologue. 

“I found my screwdriver again.” The girl pulled it from a pocket, stuffing it into Peter’s hands. “And there were _seven hummingbirds_ at the feeder today, and I could _almost_ reach it without standing on the rock but not quite. Still.”

Peter chuckled, holding the screwdriver up to the light. “You’re short, sorry Morgy.”

“I won’t be short forever!”

Pepper and Peter shared a look, amused and a bit sorrowful.

“I’m sort too,” Peter admitted, like he was sharing a secret. He handed Morgan back her screwdriver.

“But you make up for it by walking on the walls,” Morgan said. Half of her mouth edged down into a frown of thought. “Mommy’s tall.”

“You’ve got that right,” Peter laughed. “So maybe there’s hope for you after all.”

“Hope?” 

“For being tall,” clarified Peter.

A moment of surprising silence as Morgan considered this, twisting the screwdriver in her hands. Pepper felt the small of her back grow cold as her shirt brushed against the water splashed across the sink, and just barely kept in a curse as she pulled away.

“No May today?” she asked Peter, glancing back at the porch.

“Nah, she’s working at a recovery fundraiser tonight.” The boy sighed, perching on the edge of the dining room table. Morgan matched his position on the chair adjacent. 

“You got out of it?” Pepper smiled.

“Thank god.” Peter ran a rueful hand through his untamed curls. “I know I should want to be more involved with that stuff but…”

“I get it,” Pepper assured.

“You’re here instead.” Morgan looked up at Peter, extending a hand.

He took it. “Yup. With two of my favorite people.”

Pepper wrung out the back of her shirt, then immediately wiped her wet palms on her jeans. She moved toward the far counter where the pressure-cooker was squatting in all its lustrous glory. 

“I hope you like pulled pork,” Pepper sighed, “because that’s what this turned into.” She swiped an unopened bag of buns from the carb-casket—Morgan had named it after discovering the classification of bread—and tossed it to Peter.

“Thanks, I do,” he said, finding his usual spot on the left side of the table. Morgan climbed onto hers as Pepper vented the scent of barbecue through the room. 

Pork met ceramic with a series of wet slaps, and Pepper moved to sit at the foot of the table. She spun the bowl into the center. 

For ten heartbeats, they just sat in silence. Sat and looked at the empty chair, at the spot unset. 

Pepper closed her eyes.

 

**_March 29, 2024_ **

Halfway down the driveway, Pepper had set what she knew was the hummingbird’s favorite feeder. She had to fill it every other day, carrying a jug of sugar water at a three-to-one ratio. 

The feeder hung freely from its post, which curled above the mailbox in an elegant red swirl. Glass and metal, the contraption was rather heavy. It was tremendously durable, however, and Pepper loved the sound it made when the wind sent it clinking against its post.

Usually, she had to shoo away the birds in order to refill, but today, someone had gotten there first. 

Navigating the somewhat badly-kept driveway, Pepper heard the winding whisper of bike wheels, and the screech of brakes. She glanced up from the pitcher, pausing to make sure it didn’t slosh over. The approaching individual did the same.

She’d seen him before, Pepper realized as the man lifted a hand in acknowledgement. Judging from the polycotton trailer attached to his bike and the canvas sacks it contained, this was why; the mailman. 

Confirmed that nothing was out of the ordinary, Pepper continued her advance down the edge of the road and moved the pitcher into one hand. She waved with the other.

“Hello,” she called as friendly as she could. 

The man smiled, dipping his chin. One dark-skinned hand rested against the mailbox, playing with the little red flag. No one actually used it, but the mailbox looked naked without the plastic dongle. 

Making her way to the feeder, Pepper moved to set down the pitcher and free both hands.

“Oh,” said the mailman, offering his palms. 

Pepper fumbled for a moment, then relaxed. “Thanks.” She handed off the sugar water, then reached up to free the feeder from its S-hook. 

The quiet was awkward with another person beside her, so Pepper filled it with the first thing that came to mind. “It must be a long bike ride to get every house in this area,” she observed.

The man didn’t answer. Pepper paused her unscrewing to look at him, more confused than anything else.

He shrugged, making sure to keep the pitcher balanced.

“Do you live around here?” Pepper inquired. The top of the feeder came free, and Pepper reached for the sugar water. 

Handing it to her, the mailman shrugged again. It was apologetic, this time, and he uttered a string of syllables Pepper didn’t recognize. 

“Oh!” she laughed. “No English. Sorry to confuse you, I guess.”

He smiled in that slightly embarrassed way people did when they had no idea what you were talking about. Short, spiky hair grew straight out from his head, as if excited to touch the air. Pepper wondered where he was from.

The feeder sloshed in her hands as she turned it back right side-up, hanging it on the post. It swung slightly with the memory of her movements. Almost immediately, an exploratory hummingbird zipped down from the empty air above them. 

The mailman flinched slightly at the intensity and closeness of the tiny creature’s flight, but Pepper had long since grown used to it. She slowly extended her fingers, pressing them to the rim of the feeder, and waited. A questioning breath caught in the air between her and the man, until the hummingbird slowly buzzed to rest upon Pepper’s knuckles and dip its head to drink. 

Like every time, it hurt to see it fly away.

 

**_April 7, 2024_ **

Pepper had always known that Morgan was going to be different. 

When she thought about it, it always came back to that dirty old computer mouse with the USB that Morgan somehow kept clean as a whistle. It came back to the paint, the little leaves rendered on the planks of their dock. Leaves that started as oak, aspen, raspberry and became combinations of what came before. Rounded leaves with fuzzy edges, perfectly angled to look as though they caught the sun. 

Morgan asked if they could grow beans and tomatoes on the same plant. After all, they were both vines. 

Morgan asked if hummingbirds had hornet’s wings, because they buzzed. 

Morgan asked why she had hair like Daddy’s but eyes like Mommy’s.

Morgan carried her computer mouse and clicked on life.

 

**_April 18, 2024_ **

Pepper knew that she should appear more often. She spoke to authorities, to media, she updated social media occasionally and even the official newsletters. But Stark Industries wasn’t her future. It never had been. 

She wondered, sometimes, how the new CEO was getting along. They should have sent an update in the mail a few days ago, but Pepper hadn’t gotten around to checking for it. But this morning, there’d been no excuse not to stretch her legs in the direction of civilization.

But civilization had come to meet her once again.

Halfway down the driveway, the mailman was craning over the arch of the feeder. Pepper could see his wide, excited eyes from down the road as he watched the birds settling on his patient hands. 

The feeder was full to the brim, even after the few days it had been since she’d last filled it. A bit miffed, Pepper cocked her head and sped her gait. The birds usually drained it in this much time.

As she moved, the sun glanced off something in the trailer of the mailman’s bicycle. Pepper shielded her eyes, but the angle was broken with her next step. 

There was an empty pitcher nestled between the mail sacks. 

Hearing her, the man looked up. He didn’t wave, but she didn’t blame him, as his hands were covered with hummingbirds.

“Hey again!” Pepper called, hoping her tone conveyed the greeting. 

“Hi,” he replied, looking pleased with himself. 

“So you’ve picked something up,” she laughed. He could only smile at that, looking down at the birds buzzing before him again. 

After a moment, he brushed the hummingbird lightly from his hand and turned to his bike. He exclaimed something that sounded vaguely like “ndiniposi yam,” as he gathered a small bundle of papers into his arms. Turning to Pepper, he offered them.

Assuming, correctly, that they were her mail for the day, Pepper accepted the papers and tucked them under her arm. “Thanks,” she said.

“Wamkelekile.”

Pepper shook her head, laughing. “I have no idea what you’re saying.”

The man shrugged, an easy smile drawing dark lips from white teeth. After a moment, he pointed to himself. “Unathi,” he said. “Igama lam ngu Unathi D'Kash.”

Pepper furrowed her brow, adjusting the envelopes under her arm again. “What?”

He tapped his chest. “Unathi.”

“Oh!” Pepper mirrored the motion. “Pepper.”

“Pepper,” he repeated carefully, and Pepper tried frantically to place the accent.

Nodding, Unathi extended a confident hand. Pepper took it.

“Nice to meet you,” she said.

“Ndiyavuya ukukwazi Pepper.”

She stepped back, grinning. “Still have no idea what you’re saying.”

Unathi just waved, flicked down the little red flag on the mailbox, and went to straighten his bike to the road.

 

**_April 21, 2024_ **

Pepper knew how to take care of chickens from some deep set memory of when she was a child. But she read a wide assortment of brush-up manuals anyway, not that any creature could be harder to keep alive than a human child. 

Peter helped her design and build the coop, and Morgan helped her choose the location that best stimulated the rest of their yard. The elegant cage ended up nestled between the house and the garden, with the laying boxes accessible through the kitchen window. Opening into the garden, Pepper hoped letting the coop gape so the animals could wander through the beds occasionally would discourage their infestation of grasshoppers. 

They started with six chickens of four different breeds and dispositions. Morgan named them accordingly: Button, Mocha, Tetra, Zini, Buck, and Cluck. The last two were identical in all other regards. Pepper was positive it was actually Cluck eating the tomatoes, but as Morgan so sweetly reminded her, she had no proof.

She had no proof it wasn’t Morgan, either.

But the chickens had been a good decision, all in all. Six birds laid plenty for two people.

 

**_April 22, 2024_ **

Pepper knew to bring her phone the next time she went to get mail.

She missed Unathi the next few times, coming too early or too late. But eventually she and Morgan were lingering at the right moment and heard the quiet thump of bicycle tires coming up the road. 

“It’s the mailman!” Morgan exclaimed, pointing. “There, now we can go back home.”

Pepper laughed, grabbing Morgan’s hand before she could go flying back up the road. “Wait up there, Morgoona. It’s polite to say hi.”

“I’m only polite when I’m not hungry,” Morgan stated, pulling at Pepper’s hand. 

“How much time does it take to walk home?” Pepper asked.

“A minute and forty seconds.”

“And how long does it take for the human body to die of malnutrition?”

Morgan huffed. “One or two months, if you’ve got water.”

Pepper nodded, looking back at the road. “You’re fine.”

She waved as Unathi spotted them, and he lifted a hand from the handlebars to wave back. “Molweni! Hi!”

The bike screeched to a stop, and its passenger dismounted in one smooth jump. He grinned, swiping the moisture from his forehead and shaking it from the curls that clung tight to his skull. It was a warm day, especially with the corporate jacket now tied carefully to the bars of Unathi’s bike. 

Eyes trained on Morgan, Unathi smiled around a huge yawn. He propped his bike up against the mailbox and leaned down a bit.

Morgan edged into Pepper, fingers tightening on Pepper’s own. 

“Tell him your name,” Pepper reminded. “He doesn’t speak English, remember?”

Morgan pointed to herself, nodding shyly. “Morgan,” she squeaked. 

“Ndiyavuya ukukwazi,” Unathi replied. “Unathi.”

As the man turned back to his cart, rifling for that day’s mail, Pepper remembered the tool in her pocket with a jolt. She released Morgan’s hand, squeezing once before letting go, and dug in her pocket for her phone.

“FRIDAY,” she murmured to the device. “A favor?”

“Hello,” FRIDAY responded, the phone whirring to life. “What do you need, boss?”

Pepper, aggressively _not_ flinching at the title, pointed the phone’s speaker toward Unathi. He was watching them curiously. Short, round fingers played with the mail in their grip, and Pepper sidled forward.

“Mind identifying this language?” Pepper said. Then, to Unathi: “say something.”

He furrowed his brows, and Pepper tried again, bringing her fingers up to her lips and miming words.

“Ngaba ufuna ndithethe?” 

FRIDAY seized the strange sounds, and Pepper watched the simple animation of her buffering on the screen. 

“This is Xhosa,” the AI said after a moment. “I infer Unathi comes from either South Africa or Wakanda.”

At the last word, Unathi perked up.

“Well,” Pepper said with a grin, reaching down to stroke Morgan’s hair, “I suppose that answers that question.”

“Ngaba iyaguqulela?” Unathi asked eagerly, setting the few pieces of what looked like purely junk mail on the top of the mailbox.

“He asks, ‘is that translating,’” FRIDAY clarified helpfully.

“Can you… tell him it is? And that it’s nice to meet him?”

“I can.”

FRIDAY’s sleek voice dropped into a somewhat broken translation, but it was enough for Unathi to let out a quiet whoop. 

He spoke, and FRIDAY relayed. “He’s excited. He says he’s been running this route for three years, and he’s enjoyed watching your… bee-birds.”

Morgan laughed. “Bee-birds.” 

Unathi said something else, gesturing to the feeder.

“He admits he never knew you could get them to like you. And the correct translation is ‘hummingbird’; my database was too literal.” FRIDAY said. “Sorry for any confusion.”

“It’s fine, FRI,” Pepper said. Morgan slipped out from under her mother’s hand, brushing Pepper’s fingers from her hair. “Ask him where in Wakanda he’s from?”

FRIDAY began to speak again, but was cut off by a sudden rustling from behind them. The rustle turned, far too quickly, into a clatter, and Unathi moved aside to reveal Morgan trying to climb into the trailer.

“Morgan—” Pepper started toward the girl, reaching for her shoulder but not quite reaching before the six-year-old tumbled out of view. “Morgan!”

“Oh, demethi!” Unathi yelped, stepping up to Pepper’s side as they both craned over the small, polyester walls.

To find Morgan Stark, immensely pleased with herself, holding two halves of a wickedly sharp spear. 

“Mommy, look!” Morgan held them up to Pepper, almost slipping on the sacks of mail beneath her feet. “It’s vibranium.”

Pepper stared at the weapon. At the child. And then at the man beside her.

“Scratch that last question, FRIDAY,” Pepper said slowly. “I’ve got something a bit more interesting.”

Pepper Stark knew a great many things. 

She knew how to wield a weapon, long and short range. She knew how to sharpen a blade and where to sink it home. She even knew how to extricate her daughter from contact with a lethal object—to both others and the girl herself.

What she didn’t know, however, was what said lethal object was doing in the back of a mailman’s bike trailer.

“That’s one _hell_ of a letter-opener,” Pepper growled, carefully removing the spear from Morgan’s hands. 

Unathi moved to take it from her in turn, his fingers damp with sugar water. Expertly, Pepper avoided handing it over, unwilling to surrender it until she knew _precisely_ what it was doing. The man spoke hurriedly, fingers flexing. 

The phone—now tucked into her back pocket—relayed, “Unathi apologizes. Says to be careful.”

“Tell him I am. And ask what a lethal weapon is doing in his bike trailer, would you?”

Pepper looked at Unathi over the shaft of the spear. His expression landed somewhere between sheepish and apoplectic, and Pepper felt a surge of rueful amusement. Of course her mailman was a Wakandan weapons master. Why wouldn’t he be? 

The spear was smooth and strangely comfortable in her hands. The grooves she could feel beneath her palms were a script inlayed into the warm, sleek metal, and they spiraled down it and nestled against the two convex handles. The triangular head was large, less like what she might have imagined of a spear and more like a dagger all of its own. On the other end was a round counterweight, keeping the spear perfectly balanced in its center.

All in all, it was a remarkable weapon. Pepper wanted to twirl it between her fingers, over her wrists. 

“He says it belonged to his sister,” FRIDAY explained, vibrating in Pepper’s pocket. “He likes to keep it with him because it’s vibranium and he doesn’t want it to get stolen.”

Unathi’s hands were wringing in front of him as he waited for Pepper’s answer. Brown eyes flickered between her and Morgan, who was now climbing out of the trailer. He was biting one cheek, forming a little dimple in the round skin.

Pepper fixed his eyes with hers, hands slipping over the spear. 

“Is he lying?” she said, her expression not matching the sincerity of the words. 

“I don’t believe so,” FRIDAY answered. “But I don’t believe he’s telling the truth, either.”

“Dangerous?”

“The weapon is, but… not in the hands of this Wakandan. And definitely not to you.”

Pepper nodded. Hardly anything was dangerous to her anymore. Shifting her hands, she jerked her chin at the spear, then carefully tossed it back to its owner. 

 “Uxolo,” Unathi winced. 

“He’s apologizing again.”

It was a strange exchange, this translation. She hadn’t realized how much time a third party added to a conversation, how much separation. Sure she understood Unathi now, but somehow FRIDAY’s translation felt less personal. Like she wasn’t really talking to the Wakandan at all. 

Morgan trotted up next to Pepper, reaching up to take her hand, and Pepper squeezed it. The girl was practically glowing with excitement. She hadn’t yet taken her eyes off the spear. There was a headache blossoming behind Pepper’s eyes, and she decided more coffee was required before trying to proceed with the rest of the day. 

This had _not_ been what Pepper was expecting when she brought FRIDAY down today.

“No harm done.” Pepper smiled, genuine though slightly tired. “Morgan knows how to handle sharp objects.”

“Uh-huh!” Morgan chirped happily as FRIDAY translated. “I can saw stuff. And drill stuff. And solder stuff.”

Peter’s fault. That was a moment of terror Pepper never wanted to relive—she was lucky Happy hadn’t been there to panic at the time.   
“It’s a beautiful spear,” Pepper added as FRIDAY’s clicks reached the end of their message. 

Unathi smiled, fingers flickering through the runes up and down the weapon’s edges. As he gripped the counterweight, Pepper thought it she could see a dullness to the metal from countless hands before his. A beautiful spear indeed.

“He thanks you,” FRIDAY offered. 

Pepper nodded. “And I thank him for the…” she reached for the small scattering of mail across the box to her left.

“Nevermind,” she chuckled as her eyes settled across the junk titles and nugatory envelopes. “I don’t thank him.” 

FRIDAY flickered. “You don’t mean to respond?”

“No, say what I just said.”

Unathi hummed with a throaty laugh as FRIDAY finished her message, raising both hands and looking away with his own response. 

“He says not to kill the messenger,” FRIDAY translated. “Or, something like it.”

“ _He’s_ the one with the spear!”

Pepper jumped back in the delay it took FRIDAY to relay the conversation, and Unathi brandished the spear at her. The light glanced off the shaft and reflected across his grin. 

“I’ll save you!” Morgan announced. 

Then she proceeded to barrel into Unathi, nearly knocking him over, and sending the spear pinwheeling. Unathi’s other hand flew up to steady it. That unfortunately left him open for Morgan’s next attack, which bowled girl, Wakandan, and weapon onto the packed driveway dirt. 

“Morgan! Don’t _tackle random people!_ ” Pepper yelped, but no one could hear her over their laughter.

Morgan jumped up, pointing an invisible dagger at Unathi’s face. 

“He surrenders!” FRIDAY called, amused, as Unathi’s chuckling proclamation found air. 

“Good,” Morgan said, lifting her chin. “The Spice Knights reign supreme.”  
_The Spice Knights?_ Pepper didn’t question. 

The knight in question kept her imaginary weapon pointed at Unathi for a few more heartbeats, trying out a few ferocious expressions. Unathi cringed exaggeratedly. 

Satisfied with the expression of her success, Morgan dropped the invisible dagger and moved back over to Pepper. Pepper secured a hand over the girl’s shoulder on the off chance she’d have to stop another lunge. Unathi certainly seemed harmless, but her six-year-old in a scuffle with a man with a spear was _not_ something she needed to watch again. Even if he didn’t have a spear, hesitance seemed logical. 

Unathi straightened, brushing the dirt off his off-beige trousers. His smile was round, matching the curve of his chin, and it wrinkled his left eye just slightly more than his right. Hands still raised in surrender, he wriggled his foot under the spear shaft and jerked it up into his hand. 

Pepper chuckled. “What great city has fallen to Spice Knight rule?” she asked, wondering if Morgan would continue the story.

It took her a moment to remember the response would take a moment—FRIDAY’s voice came sharply in the morning air. 

“He says he’ll have to think on it,” FRIDAY explained as the conversation stretched awkwardly.  

Pepper leaned down and scooped Morgan into her arms, smoothly despite the girl’s initial squirming. “Well, tell him good luck with the rest of his route.”

Unathi nodded as FRIDAY spoke again, and Pepper tried to pick out words within the clicking syllables and rhythm of the language. She thought she might have been able to identify breaks as Unathi began to speak, but Xhosa didn’t follow her rules. It was so different from English, so far from the romantic formations Pepper knew. The alienness was captivating.

“He says ‘until tomorrow,’” FRIDAY said. “But it’s a question.”

_See you tomorrow?_

“If the hummingbirds need fed, maybe,” Pepper replied. 

It took too long for FRIDAY to say the words. It took too long to make her way back up the driveway with patience for nothing more than a wave, Morgan at her side. It took too long for Unathi to rearrange his bicycle, as he was watching them retreat each time Pepper looked back.

A hummingbird perched daintily on the point of his blade. It cocked its head, ruby breast shining. 

 

**_April 23, 2024_ **

The hummingbirds did need fed the next day. They were ravenous in the spring, after all. 

 

**_April 30, 2024_ **

Pepper knew the lake water was cold. 

It was a clean cold, a calm cold. It was comfortable, sitting on the edge of the dock and swinging the tips of her toes through the icy surface. Pepper’s book had fallen, half-open, to her side as she watched the ripples disappear out across the lake. The shattered surface reflected the light in blinding flashes from every direction. 

One of Pepper’s hands traced the flaking paint of Morgan’s leaves. This one was a strange one; some mix of mapel and cottonwood, though it sprouted edges like a tomato leaf. It was one of Pepper’s favorites, not only because it happened to be near her favorite reading spot. She liked the colors. Even as the paint dulled in the sun, the pinks and greens complement each other further. It didn’t matter that the shapes were awkward and the brush-strokes clumsy; Morgan’s leaves made the dock. 

Pepper’s feet had turned an intense pink from the cold, sending gooseflesh up her legs each time they rose and fell into the water. The ripples lapped against the legs of the dock, and Pepper listened to the splashing. 

In the distance, her ripples disappeared in the expanse of the water. She knew the arc reactor, dozens of feet down and hundreds of feet away, couldn’t feel them. 

But she kicked her legs anyway. 

 

**_May 3, 2024_ **

She was just there for mail. She lingered anyway, wondering if she'd see a tenacious bicycle coming up the road. 

 

**_May 11, 2024_ **

Pepper knew Morgan liked the garage. 

She knew Peter liked it too. But to him, it was the conflicted, exhausted enjoyment of someone with not enough memories and too much imagination. Playing and working with Morgan within the windows of the workshop, Pepper would catch him brushing his fingers over DUM-E’s arm and staring at nothing.

But he never refused when Morgan asked him to help her reach the buttons, to code something, to travel the length of the garage and organize the tools. Pepper believed he was genuinely happy to do it. The shadow that fell over him within the workshop was of pleasant remembrance. 

It was in the garage that each of them, all of them, were at home. For different reasons.

Pepper was running a careful brush through the wirey innards of Rescue beside her working children when the conversation began. 

“Your hair looks really red today,” Peter observed. 

“It’s brown.” Pepper could hear the frown in Morgan’s voice.   
“Yeah, but the sun makes it look red. Auntie May says mine does the same thing in the summer.”

Pepper glanced over her shoulder, willing to bet everything that Morgan would be expressing her skepticism at this point. She wasn’t wrong; Morgan stood with her hands on her hips and her head slightly cocked, glaring hard at Peter. 

“You’re silly,” she proclaimed. “Hair doesn’t change color. Not naturally.”

“Don’t be so sure.” Peter grinned. “A lot of the time, people’s genetics’ll shift at puberty and make their look wildly different. There was a kid in my class that went from straight, acorn-head hair to afro in like three months.”

Morgan ran her fingers through her thin, draping locks in thought. “Geneticsll.”

“What?” Peter was taken aback for a moment, before clarifying, “No I meant ‘genetics will.’”

“Oh. I know genetics.”

“Really? About chromosomes and stuff?”

And Morgan answered the same way she always did, every time Peter asked if she knew. The same way she did when he mentioned his marching band instrument, his aunt’s cooking, the periodic table. When he spoke of weather or clouds, of politics, of the rules of Cribbage. Morgan said, “tell me everything.”

Like always, Peter did. 

Pepper listened with a quiet smile as Peter spoke of all he’d learned, growing more excited as he went. He spoke of heredity, of chromosomes, of crossing over and dominant and recessive genes and the base pairs that determined that Morgan was short and smart and a girl and so many other things. Answering her questions, drawing diagrams on the scraps on blueprint paper scattered around the garage, Peter and Morgan flew through their subject like dance partners on an empty stage. 

“It’s all a micro-organization. One big, complex, yet microscopic system inside your cells, with four codes all arranged to do _everything.”_

“Like a computer?” Morgan asked. Pepper could hear her painted, dirty computer mouse clicking repeatedly in her excitement. “But not electric?”

“Yup! Like a computer.”

“Can you code it?”

That threw Peter off a second. Pepper pivoted on the dusty floor, her helmet in her lap, to watch the conversation unfold. 

“What do you mean?” Peter asked. He set down his screwdriver and knelt next to Morgan.

“If its a code, I could crack it,” Morgan assured. “Make new things.”

Beans and tomatoes on the same plant. Hummingbirds with hornets wings. A dirty, painted computer mouse that connected to everything and nothing at all. 

Peter was smiling, wrapping his arm around Morgan’s middle and scooping her into the air. “You absolutely can,” he said. “That’s called genetic engineering.”

“Can we do it now?” Morgan wriggled in Peter’s grip, bracing her hands on his shoulders so she could see the entirety of the room.

“It’s very complicated and precise,” Pepper explained, piping up for the first time. “And it can be dangerous; even the smallest mistake could make big problems.”

“But we can learn,” Morgan insisted. 

“We can always learn,” Peter agreed. “But not here; there’s not the tools for it.”

Morgan frowned. “The workshop has everything.” She said this as though it was the most obvious fact of this universe, as though the suggestion otherwise was nothing short of scandalous. 

“Mr. Stark… your daddy didn’t focus on genes,” Peter explained. “Metal was his weapon of choice.”

“Oh,” Morgan murmured quietly. “Should I… should I not, then?”

Pepper stood, her knees popping. “Not do what, sweetheart?”

“I don’t want to be the wrong kind of engineer,” said the six-year-old with all the terrible bluntness of a child. 

“There’s no wrong kind,” Peter assured.

“But I want to be like him. So he’s proud of me.”

And suddenly, Pepper was on her feet, was across the room and lifting her daughter out of Peter’s hands, and so many things were clicking into place in deafening booms of lockboxes snapping open. 

“Morgan,” she said, a hand against the girl’s head, “listen to me. Your father is proud of you. He’d be proud of you no matter what, love you through everything, just as I will.”

Morgan looked her in the eye, chewing on her bottom lip.

Pepper tucked the girl’s hair behind her ear, smiling. “And I know you miss him. We all do, more than anything. I know you want to be like him—but Morgan, you already are. No matter what you want to invent, write, read, _be,_ you are the legacy he left, and he couldn’t be prouder. You’re the legacy he always wanted to leave, wanted to be remembered for. Both of you.”

Pepper looked up, over to Peter, standing framed beneath the arm of Tony’s first bot. 

“It’s okay to move on,” she murmured. “To be who you are, because that’s all he ever expected of you. All he ever _dreamed of_ for you.”

Her cheeks were wet. When had that happened? 

The sunlight streamed in through the windows of the garage, casting pillars of white like doorways through the workshop. They crept up the table legs, fell over Peter’s fingers and the screwdriver he clutched between them. They bathed Morgan’s face, streaked across Pepper’s chest, spotted the bots and the metal and the dust. 

“He never wanted to live forever.” Pepper shook her head. 

_Part of the journey is the end._

“He could have, if he put his mind to it. It probably could have been easy. But he _never wanted to live forever._ Don’t live in his name, Morgan, Peter. Live in your own. Because that’s where he lived, more than anywhere else.

“In you.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> To be continued...


	59. Memes and Pessimism

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Despite the stakes of the universe as they knew it, not a single individual in the Compound had the willingness to stop time. So inevitably, Monday morning had May and Peter tumbling into Happy’s car on their way to the city and the week that would come.

Peter pressed himself to the tinted window as they drove away, nose brushing the glass, heedless of prints. He hadn’t made this drive enough to know its length and curves by feel yet, so he let his eyes skirt the white line at the edge of the road as Happy drove. The bodyguard was speaking to May in a sort of awkward casualty. The words a fine background to his musings, Peter tuned out more often than he listened. 

As the familiar buildings of New York began to rise around them, Peter almost chuckled at the stark dichotomy between what he imagined  _ would  _ happen today, and what had happened yesterday. Yesterday, he’d built a Stone-soldering device in a multimillion dollar nanotech workshop. Yesterday, he’d met a wizard. Yesterday, he’d spoken of the multiverse and how to mend it. 

And today, he had math homework due and a project being assigned in current events. 

It felt like a great ravine separating the two halves of his life. But if there was anything Peter had learned these last weeks, it was that that ravine had bridges. He could walk between the sides—and so could others.

If he was being honest, Peter was glad Ned knew. He was glad his friend had been there to support him through the craziness. And though she hadn’t known as long, he was glad Michelle—MJ—knew as well. 

He was driving back from the Avengers Compound, suit stuffed into his backpack. There were so many amazing things about that… but the most was that May was with him.

May was a bridge across his ravine all her own. He loved that.

She was on his side. Loki was on his side, and Vision, and Colonel Rhodes, Ms. Potts, Happy. So was that Doctor Strange, by virtue of his profession. 

Mr. Stark was on his side. 

And that… that was amazing, too. 

“Hey Peter,” May said, craning over the back of her chair. “You good? You’ve been awful quiet.”

“What? Oh.” Peter looked up, giving his aunt a thumbs-up. “I’m good, just… thinking.”

“Always a good thing to be doing.” May nodded, facing the front again.

Happy barked a laugh and his fingers danced on the steering wheel. “Just as long as you actually  _ do  _ something with all those thoughts.”

“Pft.” Peter waved a hand, making sure Happy could see it through the rearview mirror. “I’m the most productive of all of you!”

“School, spidering,  _ and  _ saving the world? I suppose I can’t argue with that.” Happy reached behind the driver’s seat to give Peter a hearty pat on the knee, then returned his attention to the road.

Smiling, Peter looked back out the window. He slipped his fingers into his backpack, rifling until they brushed against his earbuds and stuck. Phone in his pocket, he stuck one in his left ear and let Spotify pick his music at random. 

And then a head appeared in the top corner of the window, small and serpentine and very, very smug. It flicked its tongue out at him, somehow managing to grin beneath emerald eyes.  

“Loki!” Peter hissed, words lost in the thrumming of the car tires. He pressed his elbow to the button on the car’s armrest, and the window rolled down a crack. The aggressive  _ woosh  _ of passing air made him grimace. Holding up a hand, Peter jerked his chin as Loki wriggled through the inch-tall gap and pooled on his palm, curling down his wrist. Peter rolled up the window just as quickly.

Neither May nor Happy questioned the movement; it wasn’t unusual to bump the button accidentally, after all. 

Peter raised his eyebrows at Loki, who had somehow managed to turn himself around beneath Peter’s sleeve and poke his head out. The snake flicked his tongue again, and Peter sighed. 

_ Oh well. It’s not as if we haven’t done this before.  _

Peter, rolling his eyes, settled back against the window for the last few minutes of the drive. His free earbud swung as he moved and whacked Loki in the snout. Hissing, Loki curled deeper into Peter’s sleeve. 

Peter left the car as quickly as he could when they arrived at Midtown, He waved awkwardly with his left hand, as there was a snake in his right, and darted into the throng of people before anyone could notice the quality and contents of the car he’d just hopped out of. Plus, Loki wouldn’t have shifted and slithered through a window if he’d wanted to be seen by anyone else. 

Weaving through the milling students, Peter made his way to the door. “What are you doing?” he murmured in the direction of his sleeve.

“Avoiding boredom,” came the hissing response. The words were just loud enough to be picked up by Peter’s enhanced ears. 

“Seriously?”

“Everyone is busssy,” Loki huffed. “And Ssstark is mean.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “He’s not, really at all. And you like Vision.”

“Busssy.”

Taking the stairs three at a time, Peter slipped through the heavy double doors and lowered his voice further. “I was at school all last week; what did you do then?”

“Waited for you to come back.”

That drove a laugh from Peter, attracting a couple of questioning looks. He ignored them. 

“Fine, fine,” Peter chuckled, lowering his sleeve. “It’s not as if we haven’t done this before. What could go wrong?”  
“Don’t sssay that.” Loki’s serpentine laugh rose the hair on Peter’s arms. 

Another thought occurred to the boy as he swung around to his locker. “Are you okay to be snakey all day?”

No answer. 

“You as you?”

Loki’s tongue flicked; Peter could feel it. “Me as me.”

“Good.”

Loki slithered up Peter’s arm, finding a better niche around his neck and torso, and Peter was free to fiddle with the door of his locker. Nothing fell out when he opened it, for once. Swinging his backpack off his shoulders and stuffing it carelessly into the cubby, Peter blew out a breath.

“Hey Peter!”

“Yo, loser!”

Peter glanced up, craning backwards and grinning. He waved aggressively down the hallway where Ned and MJ had appeared within the throng. Hissing, Loki curled tighter to keep hold.

“Hey guys!” Peter called when they were closer. “How were your weekends?”

“Well—” Ned began, but MJ interrupted easily. 

“Skipping  _ that  _ smalltalk,” she said. “No one cares about our hermit weekends. What happened to you?”

_ “I  _ care about your hermit weekends; you’re my friends,” Peter said. He would have crossed his arms, but he didn’t want to squish Loki. 

“I’m with MJ,” Ned laughed. “You’re the one saving the world.”

Peter grinned, rifling back in his bag for his first period torture devices. “Highlight of the days would have to be… the wizard. Or the lab.”

“Um,  _ wizard?” _

Peter laughed out loud, relishing the disbelief, attention, and excitement he hardly even had to work for, here. “Oh yeah. He’s a strange guy.”

“Okay, start from the beginning,” Ned demanded, and Peter turned back to them with his arms full of papers, grinning.  
“We found the sorcerer who sent Loki back in time way in the future. His name is Stephen Strange and I’m trying to decide if he’s an asshole or not.”

“Oh, with a name like that?” MJ nodded. “Definitely.”

 “How do you know he’s a sorcerer?” Ned asked as they set off down the hall.

Peter raised an eyebrow. “Because he kidnapped Loki via a portal in the middle of the Compound, lives in a glamoured and antique building he calls his Sanctum, teleports around within it, and wears a sentient Cloak that flies.”

“Fair,” Ned squeaked, eyes wide. 

“Uh-huh.” 

“Anything productive happen after finding this wizard?” MJ asked.

“Oh, yeah, lots. We’ve found a second proper Infinity Stone, realized the mechanics of merging dimensions, and figured out how to get the Mind Stone out of Vision. Mr. Stark and Doctor Strange were arguing about collecting or locating Stones for a while but they’re on the same page now…” Peter tapped his chin, trying to remember and organize the rest of the chaos that had been the weekend. Loki slithered under his shirt, and Peter continued, “No one killed or tried to kill Loki, with the exception of Doctor Strange’s cape. And eventually we’re going to have to explicitly and illegally contact some war criminals. At that point, the clock  _ really  _ starts ticking.”

Ned and MJ were silent a moment. “That’s… good, I suppose,” Ned finally said.

“You know what’s good?” They turned down another hall, the warning bell trilling through the hallway. “Mr. Stark’s workshop.”

Ned perked up, eyes widening again. “You got to play—”

“With nanotech, yeah.” Peter grinned and rubbed his hands together, miming evil laughter. “It was  _ awesome.” _

“That’s so cool dude!” Ned yelped, speeding his steps sightly so he could stay in stride with an excited Spider-Man. 

“I took pictures, here.” Peter swung against the far wall, checking the time before thumbing open his phone. MJ and Ned flattened themselves beside him. He could feel their breath and Loki’s scales against his skin.

“You know,” MJ said as he scrolled through the photos he’d snuck while Mr. Stark wasn’t paying attention, “I was skeptical of how someone could manage all those suits along with the company and its outreach and everything else it engineers. But looking at this?” 

“You can imagine?” Peter looked at her.

“You could build the future in a place like that. And he is.”

Peter smiled softly at the hand visible in the edge of the photo as it reached for a stray pair of needle-noses strewn across the far table. “Yeah,” he said. “He is.”

There was movement against his neck; Peter craned his head involuntarily as Loki wriggled around to poke his head through Peter’s collar. He hissed quietly, and Ned and MJ whipped their attention toward him. 

“Oh my God—” Ned yelped, hands coming up as though about to attempt a karate-chop to Peter’s collarbone. He relaxed when he remembered. 

“Greetingsss again, Leedsss,” the snake said, bobbing its head. 

“Ah.” On Peter’s other side, MJ crossed her arms. “That explains a lot.”

Peter blushed a bit. “Um, yeah. He wanted to come today…”

“To school? Why would anyone voluntarily come here?” MJ leaned against Peter to turn his phone screen, checking the time. “Speaking of that, we’ve gotta run.”

“Right.” Peter tucked his phone back into his pocket and hiked his papers back up against his chest. Touching Loki’s head with his finger, he shoved his brother-in-arms back out of sight. “Let’s go.”

  
  


Peter slammed his tray down exaggeratedly when he finally,  _ finally _ made it to their lunch table three hours later. He’d ran to the restroom before getting in line, leaving Loki with his friends in the cafeteria, and when he’d returned…

“How am I supposed to even deal with a line like that?” Peter demanded. He slumped onto the bench and stared at his food, most of which had already gone cold. 

Ned, already half done with his own meal, shrugged. “I mean…”

“If you suggest announcing my secret identity, I will actually web you to a wall.” 

“And then you’d have revealed it anyway, and Leeds wins all the same.” MJ looked up from whatever she was concentrating on behind her lunch bag. There was a smear of peanut butter on her lip.

Peter huffed, stabbing a wilted lettuce leaf and chomping on it aggressively. “Where’s Loki?” 

“Here,” a silken voice hissed. Loki shot across the table to curl quickly out of sight beneath the ridges of Peter’s lunch tray. Peter laid his hand against the table, waving awkwardly to the god. 

“Glad you decided to randomly ditch the Compound?” he asked, chewing on his leaf.

“Infinitely,” Loki replied. His head peeked out from beneath the tray, curling up and over the pale plastic. Green eyes snapped to the dull butterknife nestled within Peter’s napkin.

“Don’t even think about it,” Peter said, shoving Loki back down. The god, laughing, complied. 

“Control the stabby snake,” MJ sighed, glancing up at them again.

Ned hummed thoughtfully. “The stabke. The… snabby. The—”

“Ned I swear to God.”

Ned raised his hands in surrender, accidentally flicking a noodle from his fork. It splattered against the table to their left, and the teenagers collectively ignored it.

“What are you doing over there?” Peter wondered as MJ looked down again.

“Coordinating,” MJ replied flatly.

“Coordinating what?”

He thought she was going to ignore him for a moment, but then the girl sighed and slid a little closer on the bench, swiping her lunch box out of the way. 

“A study trip,” she explained, lifting her phone. “I don’t want to hang around here next semester if I don’t have to.”

The words bit out with a hint of aggression beneath them, but not at Peter. He cocked his head. She was angry… at what?  
Thinking about it, Peter found he knew almost nothing about Michelle Jones. He knew she was smart, liked strange and occasionally gory stories, and had a strong opinion on practically everything. He knew she was wonderfully observant. He knew she could incapacitate an enemy with nothing but the element of surprise. 

But he didn’t know… he didn’t know what she did after school. Or if she had siblings. He didn’t know what she wanted to be, what her dreams were after high school. He didn’t know where she was from or where she wanted to go. He’d never heard her so much as mention her family, or their jobs, or their relationship.

She was so smart, and dedicated… why was she so adamant to leave Midtown? 

Peter’s mouth unhinged, but nothing came out. Ned saved him from gaping like a fish for too long by inquiring, “they let you study abroad here?”

MJ shrugged. “No one ever has. No one’s ever been an exchange student through this school either. But I think I can make it happen; I’ve got good help.”

She glanced back down, fingers moving at the speed of light across her phone screen for a moment. Peter thought she might have been using Discord, or her texting platform had a dark skin. Whoever it was responded in an instant.

“Where do you want to go?” Peter made himself ask.

“Yeah,” Ned agreed. “Too far away and we might miss you!”

MJ raised an eyebrow at him, but she was grinning slightly. “Oh, so far away. I’m trying to get myself to Wakanda.”

Two boys lost their collective shit.

_ “What?”  _ Ned demanded as Peter practically screeched, “oh my GOD you can  _ do  _ that?”

“That’s so cool!”

“Wakanda,  _ really?  _ Imagine all the things you could learn and build and—”

MJ grinned, holding up her hands. “Precisely. It’s a bit of a difficult process, though, because the country’s still pretty reserved. No tourists, hardly any working visas. They do foreign aid, but the immigration systems are still being worked out; no one’s even  _ thought  _ about international schooling.”

“So…” Peter gaped. “You’re trying to get the entire  _ country  _ of Wakanda to write a new policy?”

“Pretty much.” MJ typed something else, her shrug not breaking the rhythm of her typing. 

“Wakanda?” Loki’s voice broke into the conversation again. “Ssstark sssaid sssomething about that…”

“Probably! They supply vibranium and shared the adaptation methods of their nanotech,” Peter explained, still staring at MJ. “And MJ wants to  _ go live there.” _

“Where would you go?” Ned asked. “You probably can’t get into the capital city…”

“Actually I can,” MJ said with a smirk. “I told you. I’ve got good help.”

Peter, unable to contain his curiosity a second longer, allowed himself to focus on the texts across her phone screen as the mysterious individual sent another response. He couldn’t quite make out the words, as the font was too small, but he could see the contact name on the top.

“Holy shit,” Peter breathed, stiffening in his seat. 

“What? What?” Ned demanded as he leaned across the table. His face drained of color as his eyes focused on MJ’s screen as well.

She shifted on the bench, cocking her head as if daring them to voice their disbelief. And Peter did; he couldn’t help it. 

“How the  _ hell  _ did you get  _ Princess Shuri’s phone number?” _

“She’s on Tumblr,” MJ said with a shrug. “She likes dark humor and environmental jokes. I didn’t realize it was her until it was too late.”

There was silence—well, as much silence as their could be in a packed cafeteria. Peter stared, and MJ met his eyes without blinking.

“So, let me get this straight.” Peter spoke slowly, still not completely believing what he was saying. “You accidentally made friends with Shuri of Wakanda over Tumblr via memes and pessimism.”

“That’s correct.” MJ nodded and went back to her lunch. 

“Hold the  _ fucking phone!”  _ Ned yelped. 

MJ just pointed to Peter, not looking up. “He made friends with an evil Asgardian via a rock and some sweatpants. I don’t see why you’re so worked up about this.”

“It’s  _ Wakanda!”  _ Peter squawked helplessly. 

“I have an inquiry.” Across the table, Loki was rearing up from beneath Peter’s lunch tray. Even serpentine, he looked contemplative, and their attention swung to him as one. 

“Yes?” MJ snapped, cupping her chin in her palm.

“You are engineering a method to get to thisss… Wakanda?” 

“Correct.”

Loki slithered forward, pausing next to Peter’s hand where it lay against the surface of the table. He nodded at the girl’s words. “And thisss method is legal. You and perhapsss others would have an in into thisss country?”

“Correct.” MJ was frowning now, confused.

But Peter was beginning to understand.

“Are you free after school?” he asked. “Both of you?”

“How is this relevant?”

“I want you to come back to the Compound with me,” Peter explained, fingers drumming on the table.

_ “What?” _

“Why?”

Peter and Loki exchanged a look. 

“Because I think you may have just solved our Captain America problem.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me: *writes chapter*  
> Me: *doesn't like chapter. Rewrites.*  
> Me: *still doesn't like chapter. Rewrites.*  
> Me: *sTILL DOESN'T LIKE CHAPTER*  
> Me: Oh screw it I'm probably overthinking anyway--
> 
> Hope you enjoyed? Eh. XD


	60. Untouchable Belonging

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't lie, she's back.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Upstate New York was absolutely beautiful. 

MJ flattened herself unabashedly to the window of the sleek care, tuning Happy, Ned, and Peter out effortlessly. The rest of her perception focused wholeheartedly on the world flying by through the window. 

Usually, she’d be at least paying attention to the driver, but it wasn’t necessary here. Observation one: Happy’s somewhat unfocused expression in the rear view mirror. Observation two: their slight but constant acceleration, akin to the illusion of a highway. Conclusion: Happy Hogan was just as dissociated as she. 

Getting someone to cover her shift wasn’t too difficult; MJ’s coworkers owed her at least a week of recoveries. And she'd reassured her mother that the Avengers Compound was practically guaranteed to be kidnapping-free. 

Either that, or she was in more danger around such powerful individuals. She didn’t really care, either way. Though she hadn't admitted the former to her mother. 

So MJ watched the state speed by, counting the fence posts at the highway side and tracking their speed. She let her eyes focus and refocus with the movement of the car. Feeling her optical muscles contract to let her watch the smudges on the glass inches from her nose, MJ shifted her perception back and forth between the foreground and background. Browns, greens, and greys leapt by in smudges of image and awareness.

After a while, she wasn’t really watching anything. Dreams trickled up around the edges of her thoughts, and MJ closed her eyes.

“MJ?”

Someone was touching her arm. The hand was calloused, with long fingers and a wide palm, and the contact was light—conclusion: Peter Parker.  

Opening her eyes, MJ glanced over. She could sense the static frizz of her hair from its contact with the window, and wondered how much gravity it was defying today. “Yes?”

“I was just seeing if you were asleep.”

“Just thinking,” MJ replied truthfully.

“Cool.” Peter offered that smile, the one that should be illegal or at least regulated because it honestly had too much manipulative potential. MJ rolled her eyes to ward it off.

“Mind moving your leg?” an irritated voice snapped, coming from a somewhat  _ lower level. _

MJ glanced down; there was a snake curled on the middle seat of the car. She’d sprawled one leg across the bench seat they were all nestled on. Loki’s green eyes flashed, and MJ wondered how long he’d been trying to get her attention. 

Looking him right in those slitted pupils, she said, “make me.”

The snake reared, hissing, but Peter caught his tail before he could lunge. “Please don’t make her,” he yelped. 

“Are you kids behaving back there?” Happy demanded. MJ saw his eyes flicker up into the rear view mirror. 

“Sorry, Happy!” Peter said, releasing Loki. He gave both MJ and the snake a long look, and MJ moved her errant limb with a grin.

Loki stretched out across the seat, never once taking his eyes off her, and MJ blinked. In the millisecond of darkness, the snake had disappeared, to be replaced with the humanoid form of a righteously irritated Asgardian.  
“Whoa!” That from Ned in the front seat, twisting around to see the shift.

MJ didn’t deny her interest as the tingle of magic dissipated through the contained space. Perhaps the unnatural suspension of the dragon wasn’t as impossible as she’d first thought. 

Her hand slid into her backpack almost of its own accord, fingering through her binders until she found the smooth, worn edge of her sketchbook. MJ worked it out through the partially unsealed zipper. Thumbing through the pages, she folded the book open to her draconic doodle.

“Does this look like you?” she asked, flipping the sketch around so it was facing Loki.

The god’s brows furrowed. He looked to Peter, who shrugged. “She wasn’t there,” the boy explained. “I told her about it.”

“Ah.” Loki swiveled back toward MJ. Graceful fingers trailed across the surface of the page, coming back smudged with graphite. Loki sniffed at it with interest. “This is a strange painting.”

“Do you not have pencils on Asgard?” Peter asked, pressing himself against the seat in front of him to get a better look at the conversation unfolding across the car. 

“I don’t… not like this. It seems a bit like charcoal, but the wrong color.”

MJ hummed. “I have a charcoal pencil too. I don’t use it as much, though.”

“Can I see?” Peter asked, sounding curious. “I’m not super familiar with art supplies.”

There was no reason why not; MJ dug around for her pencil case, recovering it with a grunt. It wasn’t hard to find the utensil: a deep, bold black against her silver drawing pencils. She presented it to Peter as someone might bestow a sword. 

Cocking his head, Peter took it, twirling it in his fingers. Observation one: he furrowed his brow slightly and poked at the tip. Observation two: he craned to try and see the rest of the contents of her pencil case. Conclusion: he’d expected something less common-looking. MJ hid a smile.

“This seems like a practical tool,” Loki said with a nod. “Bold lines, but perfectly capable of rupturing a jugular if necessary.”

“Loki,” Peter sighed, but it was more tired than horrified. In fact, there wasn’t an ounce of fear in the boy’s voice.

Observation one.

Loki leaned comfortably against Peter to get a better look at the pencil, snatching it from his hands. With a lightning quick hand, Peter knocked the pencil so it blackened Loki’s fingertip beside the graphite. The god hissed at him, and Peter laughed. 

MJ cocked her head.

“Hey, be careful with Ms. Jones's stuff,” Happy huffed, glaring at them all in the window again. Ned nodded, and MJ could tell he was trying his best to look reprimanding. She forcefully contained a condescending comment: Leeds didn’t deserve it. 

 “It was Loki!” Peter immediately straightened, hiding his hands guilty. The aforementioned Asgardian choked on disbelieving offense. 

That had to be observation two. MJ wasn’t sure what the conclusion was yet, but she was getting there. 

Happy grumbled something under his breath that sounded like “teenagers…” and went back to glowering at the road. Glancing over at her, Peter offered a rueful, stunning smile and a shrug.

MJ snatched her pencil, tucking it back into her bag, and readjusted on the seat. The sketchbook flopped off her knees, but Loki caught it before it could crinkle against the ground. 

“Thanks,” MJ said. 

Loki hummed in response, somehow sounding both polite and dismissive at the same time. Eventually, he nodded and handed the book back.

“So my form was not Muspelheimian,” he observed. “Interesting.”  
MJ raised an eyebrow. “How are you making that sound with your mouth?”  
“It’s one of the nine realms,” Loki explained. “Home to creatures of igneous origin. Dragons are most common there, but that species does not possess wings. I must have involuntarily chosen a different subset.”

“I don’t blame you.” MJ closed her sketchbook with a nod. “What’s the point of a dragon that can’t fly?”

“Oh, the great Muspelheimians fly. They simply lack wings.”

Peter perked up. “So it  _ is  _ magic! I knew it!” 

“Now that we know there’s a multiverse,” MJ interrupted, “do we know if the nine realms are truly alternate dimensions?”

Loki shook his head, uncrossing his legs and crossing them again the other way. “The realms all belong specifically in this universe. They are simply distant planetary bodies interconnected by Yggdrasil.”

“You’re making meaningless noises again.”  
Loki rolled his eyes. “The tree of life. Guardian of wisdom and fate.”

“I want to climb it so bad,” Peter breathed, hands itching out in front of him.

MJ chuckled. “I very much doubt there’s an actual tree, but be my guest.”

Their theology discussion was interrupted by the sudden jerking stop of the car, and then the screech of tires and the centrifugal force that slammed them against the right window. Every passenger yelped. 

“Sorry!” Happy yelped. “Almost missed the turn.”

MJ peeled herself off the window and glowered at the back of Happy’s head. But she couldn’t continue for long, not as the trees parted and what she’d thought as the sky became clear as something far, far different.

The Avengers Compound was a silvery grey, like storm clouds at midday, rising with curved edges and sharp angles in an architectural wonder. It was stainless steel and sterling silver and gleaming glass, and MJ’s eyes widened at the elegance of it.  Slanted roofs caught rays of sunlight in tubular solar panels. Brown autumn grass clung to its last stalks of green as burgundy and gold leaves blew across the lawn. Enormous windows opened their faces to the sky as if embracing the light and energy that it gave. So much more than a bunker, a base, a camp, the Compound sprawled efficiently and gorgeously across the cliff face. 

“Pretty great, isn’t it?” Peter said. He wasn’t looking at the building, but at her.

Observation one: the proud tilt of his chin. Observation two: the familiarity in his steps as they slid out of the car and onto the lawn. Observation three: how easily he selected his direction as they strode off toward one of the buildings. 

Conclusion: this was Peter Parker’s home.

Determinant one: the curl of his lips as his gaze wandered across the compound. 

She didn’t conclude anything from that, but she observed it anyway.

“FRIDAY, we’re back,” Happy announced as three teenagers and a snake god crossed the threshold.

“Welcome, guests,” the ceiling trilled. MJ spun slowly around herself as the lights of the Compound brightened to a warm, comfortable glow. “How was school?”

“Good,” Peter replied meaninglessly. “Anything big happen while I was gone?”

“The boss is nearly finished reworking the prototype for your synaptic-rewriting… machine,” FRIDAY relayed, obviously not quite sure of the title. “But otherwise, hardly anything.”

“Well.” Peter puffed himself up, looking excited. “The same can’t be said for me. I think MJ here might be well on the way to solving one of our technical difficulties.”

Loki snorted.  _ “‘Technical difficulties.’” _

“I’ll alert the boss.”

“Thanks! Tell him we’ll meet in the lounge?”

“Of course.”

Peter dropped his chin, no longer so focused on the upper corner of the hallway, and spun to them. “Follow me,” he instructed, and darted off down the hallway.

The inside of the Compound was as sleek and efficient as the outside; elegantly designed without being cramped. There was greenery folded into furniture and rounded through windows to give even the most enclosed areas a sense of natural space. It really was a wonder.

She was sketching one of the twisting shelving units when their host made his arrival. 

“Just when I thought there was enough chaos in this Compound.”

Tony Stark’s voice broke easily through the white and green room. Five individuals whipped their attention to the far hallway, where the man was leaning casually against the doorframe. He stood with an air of untouchable belonging—as sleek and efficient as the Compound itself.

But MJ remembered how he'd looked with fear in his expression, and knew there was so much more to his stance now. 

“Hey Mr. Stark,” Peter said, standing. “Sorry if you—”

“Were in the middle of something?” Stark shrugged. “Always.”

MJ expected a bit of a stammer from Peter at the chastisement, but instead he grinned as though following an inside joke she wasn’t partial to. 

“What have you discovered, then, in your grand nine hours out of my presence?” Stark sat on the arm of one of the sofas and regarded Peter with eyebrows raised.

“Go for it.” Peter jerked his chin at MJ, and she took the figurative baton.

“I hear you’ve got a legal contact problem,” she said, bracing her heels against the edge of the cushion beneath her. “And I think I’ve got a way around it. The Rogue Avengers are in Wakanda, correct?”  
The change in Stark’s stance was instantaneous. Subtle, but instant: he straightened, shoulders rolling back, hands twitching out in front of him. She saw his weight shift into the balls of his feet.

“Parker,” Stark began.

“He didn’t tell me,” MJ interrupted, not wanting to witness the potential decking of her friend. “But he and his space buddy gave me plenty of information to figure it out. No one else knows; I’m far better at subtlety than… anyone in this room.”

Stark quirked a rueful smile that bore an uncanny resemblance to Peter’s. “Alright, I’ll give you that. Yes, they’re mostly based in Wakanda currently.”

“Well, then, instead of contacting them directly, why not conveniently locate yourself to Wakanda?” MJ said, spreading her arms. “Not that this place isn’t fantastic.”

“I’ve considered that,” Stark agreed. “But Wakanda focuses on outreach, not integration. You can commune with them outside their country, for knowledge exchange or policy discussion or evaluative work. But entering the country is a whole other ball game; not even I can manage it for long periods of time.”

“And that’s where I come in.” MJ grinned, and she hoped it was sharp and confident. “I’ve been working to get myself there for an educational exchange for a few weeks now.”

Stark looked impressed, albeit grudgingly. “That’s a number of hoops to jump through.”

“Indeed. But I’ve got help; namely, Shuri.”

The grudgingness disappeared. “Say again?”

“She accidentally became online friends with Princess Shuri,” Ned clarified.

Peter nodded. “And now they’re working together to try to get MJ to Wakanda. I thought that if they’re willing… we might be able to expand that to get the rest of us to Wakanda so we could talk to some other people on the list, y’know?”

Stark nodded, slowly, frowning thoughtfully. Then he fixed his gaze on MJ, and it was the same expression, the same look—but something was different. Something was truer. 

“That might work,” he murmured. Then he pointed at her, in a signal that might have been a finger-gun. “Don’t think I know your name.”

“Michelle,” MJ said. “Michelle Jones.”

“Well, Ms. Jones,” Tony Stark said as he stood, casting his gaze across their group. “Mind introducing us to a princess?”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually really like this chapter... hope you did too! 
> 
> Also!!! I have a Tumblr and stuff: doitwritenow. I haven't done a ton on it yet, but if you're interested, that's what it is. :)
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	61. A Hummingbird's Throat

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's my birthday!!! As a gift from me to me, have a chapter? XD
> 
> Also kind of spoilers from Far From Home (I know I've already spoiled but I feel bad so SPOILERS)

 

**_Earth-199999: May 18, 2024_ **

 

“I know it’s probably my insanity kicking in again,” Pepper said, glancing out the window for the nineteenth time, “but I think Morgan is communicating telepathically with the chickens.”

May followed her gaze, palms wrapped cozy around a coffee mug, and snorted at the sight. Morgan sat atop one of the posts of the garden fence, Mocha the chicken in her lap. The girl was speaking, though neither woman could hear her words, and the chicken looked as happy as a chicken had the anatomical capability to look.

“That’s a fair concern,” May agreed as the chicken stood, preened its feathers, and settled back down again. “But I think Morgan communicates telepathically with just about everything.”

Pepper laughed. “Yeah, you’re not wrong. Every time we get in the car—which isn’t often, nowadays—she just…  _ wills  _ her car seat into unbuckling itself. I never see her hands move.”

“Peter used to puke all over himself in a car seat,” May mused. 

Pepper raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t even know you had a car.”

“We didn’t, and we certainly don’t now. They were mostly rentals or public transport ones—which made it even more awkward.”

“I can believe that.” Pepper took another sip of her fresh coffee. “Morgan always throws up red. I swear we don’t eat  _ that  _ many tomatoes.”

“Peter’s is always this phosphorescent orange—even still when he’s older. And he doesn’t even  _ like  _ carrots.”

“Oranges?”

“I dunno, maybe.”

Pepper glanced out the window again. The girl had been joined by another chicken, which was staring intently at her as she spoke.

“Peter always had this weird thing with acorns.” May shifted in her seat, reaching for one of the snow peas they’d picked that morning. She bit into it with a crunch. “He was obsessed with them. Would insist we go to this one park with an oak tree every afternoon for months and months—and each time, he’d find  _ every single fallen acorn  _ and put them in his shirt, then dump them one at a time down the slide. I have no idea.”

“That’s amazing,” Pepper chuckled. “I can totally see tiny Peter with his acorn haircut dumping acorns everywhere.”  
“He was a menace,” May agreed.

Pepper hummed, mug clinking against her fingernails. “We haven’t been to a park in a long time.”

“Yeah… you haven’t left upstate much at all lately,” May observed. 

“Only really for groceries.”  
May didn’t say anything for a long second. Pepper turned to look at her, a bit concerned by the thoughtful silence. 

“You should come to the city,” May suggested, looking Pepper straight in the eye. “For a few weeks.”

“Weeks?” Pepper shook her head, huffing a laugh. “I can’t leave the bots, or the garden and the chickens.”

“People leave their homes all the time!” May objected. “They get sitters, or neighbors to check up, or get everything on an automated system. It’s not impossible.”

Pepper just shook her head again. “I don’t—”

“Pepper. You haven’t really  _ been  _ anywhere for months. And I know… I know it’s easier to stay. To be separate. But you can’t live in the shadow of the past forever. Think of Morgan, think of how much you  _ love  _ the city, think of what it would do for you. Just to be there again.”

The smell of exhaust and refuse and food, the feel of thick air and warm sky and companionship. The sight of the sun glancing off high windows and pooling on sidewalks. The taste of smog and purpose while the sounds, the  _ sounds  _ of cars and trains and voices and  _ life  _ reached cacophonous calls around her. 

Pepper did love the city. 

“I love it here, too,” she said quietly.

“That’s allowed,” May murmured, leaning forward to cover one of Pepper’s hands with her own. “That’s allowed. But you’re allowed to love more than here, too.”

Pepper nodded. Against the mug, her nails kept clinking. 

“You can stay with us,” May mused, and Pepper could see her eyes flickering around her skull as she mapped the space in their apartment. “We’ll put you guys in Peter’s room and he can stay on the couch for a bit; it’s not like he spends any time at the apartment during the week. School and patrolling.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Pepper protested weakly. “I can…”

“Nonsense! It’s way more fun this way.” May grabbed two more snow peas and chucked one at Pepper, who just barely snatched it before it splashed into her coffee cup. “We’ll house the billionaires this time around.”

“Hardly a billionaire anymore,” Pepper said. “Just… millionaire maybe.”

“Oh, yeah,  _ just millionaire,  _ sure then,” May squawked sarcastically. She was laughing a second later, and so was Pepper.

“Will you come?”

Pepper looked out the window. Morgan was looking in.

“Yeah,” she said. “Why not?”

 

**_June 1, 2024_ **

Pepper knew she probably shouldn’t have left things in the hands of the postal service.

The animal’s care was organized—she was happy to pay the neighbor’s teenagers a few bucks to check up on the chickens and feed the hummingbirds each day—and they’d gotten the garden on an automatic irrigation system. Peter installed FRIDAY in the barn so DUM-E would have some company. 

The house was clean, the barn was reset, everything was fine when they came back. May was right—the trip had done wonders for Pepper in that way that only New York could. She’d remembered what connection felt like, what being with the rest of the world felt like. And it wasn’t as scary, wasn’t as lonely as she’d thought. 

Pepper parked the car halfway down the driveway as she always did, and walked hand-in-hand with Morgan the rest of the way. Nothing seemed to have burned down. She could hear the chickens clucking curiously, and the leaves of the garden were green, and Pepper was feeling hesitantly confident that tomorrow might be something new, something meaningful. 

She was ascending the porch stairs when she remembered the call she’d made to the post office. Two weeks of mail to the former CEO and continual owner of Stark Industries didn’t fit in a conventional mailbox. Unless that mailbox happened to be the TARDIS, the paper would come spilling over, folded in on itself, stacked like the Empire State beside the post. So Pepper had put in an order for the service to keep her mail in the PO box, where she could pick it up on the way back. They’d never called her back. But then again, she hadn’t stopped to pick it up either. 

She should’ve, and now, on the porch as she and Morgan made their way toward the door and Pepper fished for her key, were fourteen neat piles of magazines and envelopes and postcards. Each was pinned carefully under a different rock. Today’s strong wind pulled at the corners, but the weights held the paper steady. It must have rained; Pepper could see dried muddy footprints leading up and down the stairs where they were standing. The wind was whipping the dirt away even as they spoke. 

“The mail’s laying a siege,” Morgan observed. 

“Apparently,” Pepper agreed. She pulled out the stray house key, and Morgan bounced up to take it from her fingers. Unlocking doors was one of Morgan’s favorite things, as they’d learned in these last weeks. 

After setting their bags inside in a haphazard pile, Pepper returned to the porch to survey the… siege. Counting the piles, she found there wasn’t one for today—assuming there was one for every other day. It was still quite early.

Morgan slipped back outside a moment later, reaching up to take Pepper’s hand. “Our mail is special.”

“I think it was Unathi,” Pepper said. She leaned down to gather up one of the piles, considering taking it inside.

“He was just doing the mail’s bidding.”

Pepper laughed. “Do you think it’s safe to take our sentient mail inside, then?”

Morgan stared at the piles for a long moment. Her nose scrunched in thought and against the wind, and Pepper smiled wider. 

It was moments like this, the everyday expressions of her daughter, the random words, the easy gestures, that overwhelmed Pepper. God, did she love this girl more than life itself.

“It’s safe,” Morgan declared. 

And with that, the piles began to make their way into the house, one day at a time. Pepper checked each for important news, and collected it on the banister of the porch for later reading. They got through the first week quite quickly. Then Morgan began to lose interest, and Pepper sent her inside to start packing. Checking in on the girl every few minutes, the second week took Pepper longer.

Today’s mail arrived not an hour later.

As always, Pepper understood not a word of Unathi’s question. But he sounded excited, maybe relieved, and she turned with a wave toward the driveway.

Maybe it was the city. Maybe it was the faces she’d seen, throngs of strangers for weeks. Maybe it was the sunlight making its way through the aspen trees. Maybe it was the time she’d been gone. Maybe it was all those factors, pooling together to make Pepper so undeniably happy to see the lanky man and his ugly beige uniform, hailing from the wealthiest country on the planet and owning nothing more than a bicycle. 

And a spear made of the strongest metal on earth.

What  _ was  _ her life?

Unathi held today’s mail against his chest, head cocked slightly to the left. His hair had gotten longer since she’d last seen him. It flopped slightly, drifting against his ears instead of just sticking straight out from his head. She liked the look.

Smiling involuntarily through the hair the wind whipped in her face, Pepper started down the steps. 

“Molweni, Pepper!” Unathi watched her softly, slanting that curving smile that mirrored his jaw.

One of Pepper’s hands decided to reach for FRIDAY and her translation, while the other tried to wave—the first was counting on the second’s help, however. Pepper ended up dropping both phone and wave, the first cracking on the stones of the driveway. 

“Oh,  _ shit— _ ” 

Two voices spoke as one, and Pepper glanced up from where she’d knelt to scoop up the phone to see Unathi sprinting after a flock of envelopes escaping in the wind. Only a few remained in his left hand, crinkled slightly as he tried to keep the gale from taking them too. Looked like he’d also tried to wave with an unavailable hand...

Pepper had just enough time to think that of  _ course  _ Unathi’s single known English word was a curse before the mail was flying out over the surface of the lake. Settling on it. Sinking beneath it.

“Oh, bhentse emfene!” Unathi spat, and Pepper didn’t have to understand the words to know she should probably cover Morgan’s ears. 

“It’s alright!” Pepper called, stuffing the phone into her pocket. 

But Unathi just kept speaking, words quieting until they were under his breath, sprinting out onto the dock, his hands reaching uselessly into the air.

“Just leave them!” Pepper yelped, breaking into a run. Long legs pumped, and Pepper made it onto the dock a few steps behind Unathi. The boards creaked under her steps. 

But she wasn’t fast enough as Unathi kicked off his shoes, his socks. Pulled off his jacket and revealed the too large T-shirt beneath. It had a sunflower on it.  
“Just leave them!” Pepper called, as if volume could make up for the language barrier. “You don’t have to—just leave them!”

Unathi dived off the pier not seconds later, slipping beneath the water with a splash that lapped at Pepper’s shoes. 

“Oh,  _ f—! _ ” Pepper caught herself, muscle memory with her six-year-old. Practically flying the last few feet along the dock, she hopped as she attempted to untie her shoelaces simultaneously. “Unathi!”

The man surfaced with a coughing exclamation. His hair weakly attempted to keep its vivacity, sticking up in awkward clumps. Unathi dove under again, and Pepper saw his hand reappear with a few soggy envelopes a moment later, the muddy water churning around him. 

“It’s the sentient mail’s bidding,” Pepper hissed, fumbling her phone out again and chucking it to the side of the dock. She was going to say something else, but her now-bare foot caught the edge of the dock. 

Arms flailed. Hair whipped. A shocked breath escaped her throat. Pepper hit the water. 

The lake forced itself into her mouth, and Pepper emerged, spluttering, hair an opaque curtain in front of her face. “Oh  _ fuck—”  _ she coughed, “it’s  _ freezing!” _

Her toes were already numbing, and Pepper shook the hair from her face as she tried to pinpoint Unathi’s location. A soggy arc of flying paper drew her attention back to the man frantically trying to mend his mistake, collecting the drifting, weightless paper as best he could. Water dripped from his nose and chin. They sent tiny ripples through the glassy surface of the water. 

“What are you doing?” Pepper demanded, forcing herself to kick out through the frigid liquid toward the man.

Unathi just looked at her, looking halfway embarrassed and halfway guilty. Dark hair dripped into his eyes. In his hands, the newest update from Pepper’s CEO leaked its ink through the hearty paper envelope. 

“What,  _ what are you doing?”  _ She said again, coughing through the water as a chuckle found its way up her throat. 

Unathi shook his head, over and over, helplessly brandishing Pepper’s mail. Treading water, Pepper laid a hand across it and just let the paper free beneath the water. Unathi protested, but the splashing of the lake drowned the words out. Pepper’d have gotten twice this many emails, anyway. 

“You are far too dedicated to your job.” Pepper laced her fingers with Unathi’s, kicking out to tow them both back to the dock. She wrapped her fingers, trembling with cold, around one of the posts and hauled. It took two tries. 

Unathi braced himself against the other side, and together, they tumbled onto the planks, flopping like grounded fish. The painted leaves were smooth against Pepper’s hands while their dripping clothes spread water across the wood. It soaked into their shoes, their socks, Unathi’s jacket—so much for removing them in the first place. Pepper only just managed to catch her phone before it slithered off into the lake. 

Then she just slumped onto her back, hand still curled against Unathi’s, and laughed. 

His smile was wide when she looked at him, and Pepper could only shake her head and throw the wet, torn clump of paper at that delightfully tenacious face. Unathi’s chuckle joined her own, deeper than his voice and as rhythmic and popping as his language.

In the freezing water beneath them, the world’s demands drifted down and down on browning sheets of white paper, toward the silt and the leviathans below. 

It was all just rubbish anyway. 

 

**_June 15, 2024_ **

In the mailbox, nestled between two heavy manila envelopes, was a wildflower.

On the dining room table, slowly growing in size and color, was a vase.

 

**_June 22, 2024_ **

Pepper knew Peter needed a break. She’d gotten hers thanks to him, and was only happy to help pave the way for his own. Sure, Pepper couldn’t fund the tour program overly much—May wouldn’t allow it—but if a few extra dollars got donated to her boy’s GoFundMe profile, no one was the wiser.

“I’ll be the Spider-Man while you’re away,” Morgan assured as she climbed onto Peter’s shoulders. 

He gripped her ankles, spinning around himself in the slightly cluttered living room. “I don’t doubt it, Morgoona. You be a good help to your mommy, okay?”

“I’m always a good help!” Morgan yanked on the boy’s curls, and Peter shook his head with a laugh.

“Oh I know. But be extra good when Peteo’s not around to clean up in the workshop!”

Pepper watched the exchange with a grin, bracing herself against the back of the couch.  Peter’d gotten so tall—he was almost her size, now, and it had only been a few months. Late afternoon sunlight shone through the window, and the staircase cast a ninety-degree shadow across the boy’s forehead. 

“Anything you need us to keep straight here while you’re gone?” Pepper asked. “Besides crime in the Queens underground?”

Peter paused his twirling, frowning slightly in thought. “Um…” 

In the silence, Morgan went to pull on his hair again, irritated with the sudden lack of playfulness on Peter’s part. With practiced fingers, Peter caught her hands and calmed them. Morgan settled against his head, tucking her chin over one of his ears. 

“There is one thing,” Peter said, and Pepper was instantly at full attention.

“Yeah?”

Peter chewed on his lip, as if trying to decide what to say, or if he should be concerned. “Could you check up on Wong every once in a while? He says everything’s fine, but I haven’t seen Strange in months and he owes me like sixty cribbage games at this point.”

Ah. The unusual schedules and missing individual had at least some explanation, then. “I can do that,” Pepper assured, straightening from the couch. The fabric had left patterns on her palms and thighs. “I still have Wong’s number from the wedding… I’m sure Strange is fine, though. Probably his multiversal obligations.”

Peter shrugged. “I hope so.”

He flopped down onto the couch, and Morgan climbed down onto the cushion beside him. The springs squeaked as she bounced slightly, and Pepper saw a bit of dust flurry up in the sunbeams. A hand on Morgan’s knee, Peter sighed.

Morgan caught the tone. “Aren’t you excited?” she wondered, voice small.

“Of course I am,” Peter assured. “So excited, for this trip and for everything that can happen. I’m just… I’m not taking my suit.”

Pepper straightened.

“Europe doesn’t really need a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man,” Peter explained, patting Morgan’s knee with a bit of a grin. 

Pepper said nothing, moving around the couch to sit beside her kids. 

But she couldn’t help but think it sounded more like Peter was convincing himself than anyone else. 

 

**_June 25, 2024_ **

Pepper should have known nothing would go right.

“Please, Happy. Find him.” 

The man’s face was grim, mouth drawn tight beneath tired eyes. 

“I will.”

* * *

 

_ Even Dead, I’m The Hero. _

 

**_June 26, 2024_ **

The next time someone used Tony as an excuse to commit mass murder, Pepper was going to lose it.

She started wearing the Rescue’s arc reactor again.

 

**_July 2, 2024_ **

Pepper should have known everything would go wrong.

_ ‘Spider-Man’s real name is—  _

_ ‘Spider-Man’s real name is Peter Parker.’ _

“Mommy, look. Peteo’s on the TV.”

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heheheheh fuck far from home.


	62. The Stalk and the Leaf

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! Sorry I didn't get to answering comments on the last chap. I got distracted by "Red, White, and Royal Blue" by Casey McQuiston. Highly recommended. 
> 
> Anyway, I've been hinting at this moment for forEVER and I'm so exciiiited.... Lol, I suppose I did foreshadow way back a million years ago, so--y'know, I'mma just stop talking and let you read it now. Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

****

“Hello?”

“Hey hey hey.”

“Can you hear me over there?”  
“I copy, loud and clear.”

“Please never ever answer a Skype call like that ever again.”

Loki could hear the words, but failed to see the mouths they came from. He’d long since situated himself as far from Stark’s illusion screen as he possibly could. Being in-room was required for being in earshot, however, so Loki perched like a jaguar on the edge of one of the tables. He might have looked out of place, but with the amalgam of individuals crowded around the screen, a bilgesnipe in a tutu wouldn’t have gotten second looks. 

Michelle Jones was seated before the computer, directly in the view of its camera and with the cleanest image of what was unfolding upon it. Peter and Leeds were crammed together at her left. They practically climbed over each other to get a clearer view. On the right, Stark was watching the boys with an irked sort of amusement, his attention shifting between the screen and his companions. Colonel Rhodes, Vision, and Ms. Potts formed a semicircle in the back, and Loki tacked on the very edge. 

“I’m the one running this Skype call,” came the slightly automated voice through the speakers. “Which makes you the one answering.”

“I am under zero illusions that a Stark satellite service and your Wakandan matrix would fail to instantly connect and keep you from being able to ‘copy loud and clear’. Ever.” MJ braced her chin on her hand and glowered at the screen, eyebrows raised. 

“Aw, I’m flattered.”

The girl on the screen was grinning, but Loki could see her gaze flicking to the peripheral of the screen. He knew that look; she was categorizing her audience, evaluating for threat. 

He wasn’t in view. 

“Want to introduce me to the entourage?” Princess Shuri asked, sitting back and crossing her arms over her chest.

She looked to be a competent individual, Loki figured as he craned over Vision’s head for a better view. There was no hesitation or doubt in her presentation as she spoke easily to a room full of powerful, universally important people. She had the bearing of one, herself. 

“Ah yes, meet the circus troop,” MJ sighed. She twisted in her chair, almost nailing Peter in the kneecap with her foot in the crowded space. 

“The idiots to your left,” the girl continued, “are Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man, and Ned Leeds.”

“H-hey, Your Highness,” Peter stammered. He waved disconnectedly. “An honor to meet you?”

“Oh I’ve heard of the Spider-Man!” The princess exclaimed, leaning closer to her screen. Part of Loki wanted to shiver at the intensity of the gaze she leveled on Peter, but most of him was simply glad it wasn’t aimed at Loki himself. 

“You… have?” Loki couldn’t see Peter’s face, but he could imagine the confusion and pride warring for dominance across his expression. 

“Are you kidding? You’re the biggest fucking meme,” Shuri chuckled. 

Peter’s head cocked, and Loki could see the grin in the way his cheeks lifted. “I like the dancing gif.”

“Seconded.” The princess raised a finger. “I made you do that stupid animated jingle for the entirety of the first half of  _ Hamilton.” _

“You like  _ Hamilton?” _

Shuri raised her hands. “Uh, everybody likes _Hamilton.”_

Rhodes and Potts shared a look. 

_ “Getting back on topic,” _ MJ said pointedly, waving her hands in front of the screen. “Behind me is Colonel James Rhodes, the Vision, and Ms. Pepper Potts.”

“Very pleased to meet all of you,” Shuri said, waving. “I can say I’ve definitely heard of each of you.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Rhodes muttered.

“It varies.” Shuri shrugged, and behind her, something let out the aggressive shriek of metal on metal. Head whipping around, Shuri was on her feet in seconds. “Sorry, let me just fix that…” 

She raced off screen, leaving them to stare at a silvery wall and its swooping ebony designs as the sounds of chaos. There was a thump, a few squeaks in rapid succession, and then a string of curses overshadowing another large scream. They were clicking and rhythmic; a different language that Loki couldn’t place and therefore couldn’t magically translate. Eyebrows creeping progressively higher, he let himself imagine what demon of a creation was making those noises. 

He thought he might like this one.

MJ leaned forward, hands braced wide on the table before her. She didn’t look concerned in the least. “Shuri what the hell are you doing?”

The princess zipped back into the visible frame, slightly out of breath. “Preventing cataclysmic electronic failure, but please continue with your little introduction.”

MJ rolled her eyes so far it knocked the entirety of her head backwards. “On my other side is Tony Stark,” she sighed.

“Waiting very patiently for us to get around to him.” Shuri pointed at the camera.

Stark snorted. “The longer you talk, the less inclined I am to believe this was a good idea.”

Shuri smirked. “C’mon, give an engineer a chance. I’ve always wanted to meet you.”

“Likewise,” Stark admitted, crossing his arms. Loki could see the slant of his shoulders as he regarded the girl on the screen. “For, y’know, as long as I’ve known you existed.” 

Humming, Shuri regarded him for a moment. Then she said, “Pluto’s planetary status?”

Stark raised an eyebrow, but otherwise didn’t react to the somewhat abrupt change of subject. “It doesn’t have a planetary status. It shouldn’t; the formal definition of a planet, as established in 2006, says a planet is a celestial body that orbits the Sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium shape, and has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit. Pluto doesn’t fill these criteria. There’s no use whining about it.”

Shuri watched him for a long moment, then broke into a wide grin. “Congratulations, you have passed the test. Pretend I’m shaking your hand, here.” She stuck her hand forward toward the camera. 

With a long suffering sigh, Stark did the same, miming gripping Shuri’s. “What, do you not associate with Pluto activists?”

Shuri sat back down, shrugging. “I don’t understand their passion, but if they provided a serious argument I would respect their ability to defend their opinions. I would question their scientific capabilities, however.”

“Pluto’s not a planet,” Loki said. “The individuals there refer to themselves as a dwarven race—it’s rude to disregard their social designations.”  

Everyone paused. Then everyone turned to look at him with varying amounts of abject confusion. 

“Who was that?” Shuri inquired, leaning forward in her chair.

“Oh yeah,” MJ sighed as she reached out to snag the base of the holoscreen. She spun it toward Loki, so his lurking position was no longer shadowed out of frame. “One more introduction. This is Loki of Asgard.”

“Someone get me a cookie; I’ve heard of this guy too.”

Loki liked cookies; he could get behind this. 

“I cannot say the same,” he said instead, forcibly restraining himself from manifesting his knife and demanding a detour for snickerdoodles.

“Oh, you don’t know me in distant parts of this universe?” Shuri clicked her tongue, shaking her head. “This is a problem that  _ must  _ be remedied.”

“We might be on our way to doing exactly that,” Stark sighed. He reached behind him to seize the edge of the table and yanked it forward so he could lean against the corner. “Any free time in your schedule for saving the world?”

* * *

 

The explanation went much faster this time around, even with the addition of Strange’s lecture—or as much of it as Tony could remember. Sometime between their last description and now, Peter, Loki, and Tony had simultaneously decided that explaining the Stone was Loki’s job, the list was Peter’s, and Tony was left with the mechanics of dimensional merging and the implications of a combined timeline. He couldn’t help but think, as he fielded Shuri’s lightning-speed questions, that he’d drawn the short half of the stick on this.

“But the ‘promotion of life’ doesn’t explain what would actually  _ happen!”  _ Shuri yelped. She was practically standing on her desk at this point, hands waving wildly. “What about your location in timespace? What about non-sentient organisms?”

“Devolution of telomeres as cells divide  _ slightly  _ more often in one dimension than the other due to an injury of some kind?” MJ contributed.

“Things like buildings, vehicles—hell, entire planets?” Peter added.

“They aren’t living, but they’re sure important,” Ned agreed. 

Tony rubbed his face, trying to separate his thoughts of theoretical magic from his memories of actual magic without forgetting anything Strange had said. 

“Unfortunately,” he said, cutting off the continued interrogation, “I am not the wizard you should be talking to. But I can tell you he said the merging would tip toward whichever version had a stronger… ‘dimensional energy signature.’”

“So yeah, if something’s entirely  _ missing  _ from a dimension, the other will fill the gap, that makes sense,” Shuri said, waving a hand. “But if I had a metal arm or something, but I didn’t in the other dimension, what would happen with the merging? There’s no signature for my arm in this dimension, so that’d be filled by an ‘arm’ command by the second, but there’s no signature for the ‘metal’ in the other. So the same would happen!”

“It’s two conflicting universal commands,” the Ned boy said. 

“Whichever was stronger would likely dominate, then.” Tony shrugged. Not knowing for sure made him want to sink his teeth into something, but there was nothing to do about that at the moment. 

“Which would be stronger?” Shuri pressed.

Peter piped up, musing, “I don’t think there’s a constant formula. Doctor Strange said that universes are defined by their location in the 4D space of the multiverse, but also by the shape of their timelines. If your metal arm was super important to the events of your life story, then wouldn’t it have way more dimensional energy?”

A pause.

“That… would make sense, I suppose,” Shuri admitted carefully. “But how can we be so sure the combinations would be compatible? That they won’t kill people or rewrite an entire reality?”

Loki moved forward to field that one, thankfully. “If these were two separate universes, we wouldn’t know. But these aren’t; because of this.” 

Loki reached into his pocket, and Tony stepped back to allow the princess a clear view of the Gem as it came into view. 

“Is that the Stone?” Shuri leaned forward.

“Yes. But it’s from the other dimension,” Vision contributed.

 Tony wracked his mind. “The Stalk.”

Rhodey shot him an incredulous look. “The  _ stalk?” _

“Sure, it’s easier than saying ‘the dimension Loki’s originally from.” Tony shrugged. “Yours was the Stalk, ours is the… Leaf.”

“Ignoring Tony’s questionable naming abilities,” Pepper interrupted, “this Stone is connected to its dimension.”

“Right.” Peter brought two fingers up, positioning them side-by-side. “It’s power is keeping the Stalk and the Leaf parallel, meaning they  _ have  _ to have compatible timelines.”

“That’s fucked,” Shuri observed. “All this is completely fucked.”

“You’re not wrong,” Tony sighed. He shifted so the corner of the table wasn’t digging so aggressively into his thighs, fingers tapping against the table. The ranks of heroes around the screen had fallen into disarray at this point, more a clump than any neat formation. 

“Why are you speaking to me and not my brother? And why now? Why not, I dunno, five weeks ago when all this shit went down originally?”

“One, because Loki and Peter didn’t see fit to  _ tell me  _ until three or so days ago, and two, because we’d have to travel through a lot of ‘state your business’—” Tony lowered his voice and mimed thrusting a spear at the screen— “to get into contact with your king, which would mean explaining multiple times, which would mean the world knowing of the imminent end of the world before we had any plan to stop it.”

“You want me to talk to him.”

“Well—”

“Yes,” Pepper said, stepping forward and setting a hand on Tony’s shoulder. “We do. We’d also like political permission to bring our chaotic troop of apocalypse-stoppers to your country.”

“Why.”

“We could always use more help,” Peter said, smiling a bit. 

“You’re brainpower wouldn’t hurt,” Tony agreed, “especially because I’m going to need to build a spaceship at some point.”

“It’s a way to get out of New York.” MJ’s fingers played across her knees with the words. 

Rhodey eventually stepped in to summarize: “So we can pool our resources.”

“Fair enough,” Shuri said with a nod. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Thank you.” Pepper said, her hand dropping from Tony’s shoulder as he shifted against the edge of the table again. 

Beside him, Loki moved to tuck away the Time Gem. He opened his mouth, gaze drifting questioningly to Peter, as though realizing a question.

He never got to ask it.

Loki missed his pocket, his hand dropping the Gem into empty space. Still preoccupied, the Asgardian didn’t realize. A flash of emerald caught the underside of the desk. Tony saw.

He moved on instinct, not wanting to hear the clatter of the Gem’s connection with the floor. It was hardly difficult to reach out, hardly difficult to close his fingers. Tony snatched the Gem out of the air. 

* * *

 

_ Wrong wrong lost gone not right missing separate wrong missing wrong lost lost lost Tapestry wrong home not here gone where wrong time lost hate wrong lonely lost wrong gone missing wrong— _

_ Oh. _

_ Him. _

_ He snaps.  _

_ The One. _

_ Go home. _

* * *

 

And everything went white. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> heheheheheHEHEHE


	63. Double Meaning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all are lucky bastards that my teachers didn't give me much homework this weekend, just saying. 
> 
> AlsoI'msoexcitedandalsoproudofthissoIhopeyoulikeitEnjoy!

 

**Earth-200004/199999, Shared Astral Plane:** **_November/March 2016/2024_ **

 

For a long stretch of no time at all, Tony was falling. 

And just as abruptly, he wasn’t anymore. He wasn’t anywhere anymore, his form turned to nothingness and his mind left stranded. His eyes were squeezed shut, but the blackness was made of blue light, shot through with shattered white like lightning streaks. Stretching, fracturing, he was pulling away from something, yanked toward something else. 

Tony opened his eyes. 

The world around him froze. No, the world  _ before  _ him froze. He wasn’t in it anymore; it was as though he stood above a diorama caught between one moment and the next. 

A diorama displaying  _ him. _

Directly in front of him, Tony Stark was lunging forward, caught mid-catch as his hands wrapped around the Gem. His weight was shifted off-balance, but he hadn’t fallen. He didn’t so much as move. Every inhabitant, every form around Tony, was completely frozen and somewhat fuzzy, like someone had hit the pause button on a badly filmed 3D movie. 

Tony looked down at his body with nothing duller than panic, raising his hands before his face. They were translucent, a greyish blue as though the hue had been leached from them. The fingers flickered white-hot at their edges.

“Holy shit!” Tony yelped. “Holy _shit!”_ _  
_ His voice sounded like it came from beneath nine atmospheres of pressure while his form drifted weightlessly. Tony squeezed his eyes shut. The maelstrom of light and color that assaulted him as soon as he did so was worse than the strangeness of the frozen world. Warding off the confusion-fueled terror, Tony cracked open his left eye.

And the diorama before him disappeared. 

Instead of the workshop, the Compound, Tony found himself hovering thousands of feet up, a watery chasm gaping beneath him. He barked another curse, arms flailing, and his other eye snapped open. 

His team reappeared, his building too. But now he could identify that their fuzziness was an overlay, that he was seeing them transposed upon the nothingness of the other world. Or maybe the other world was transposed upon his.

Forcing himself to breathe, Tony closed his first eye, cementing his Compound in his view. He tried to take a step forward, but the movement didn’t find any resistance. Instead, it was the thought that moved this ghostly perception of Tony’s form, sending it drifting forward slightly. As far as Tony could tell, he’d  _ willed  _ himself forward.

So he did it again; he concentrated on Peter’s frozen form and thought about moving.

He zipped forward.

“Shit shit  _ shit—”  _ He didn’t  _ stop  _ zipping, passing through Peter’s body as though it wasn’t there, careening through his workshop tables, knocking himself between DUM-E’s arm. 

_ STOP!  _

Tony didn’t know if he thought the word or screamed it, but his transparent form halted so quickly it would have given him whiplash, if there was anything physical about what was happening here. He was sprawled directly in the center of a hydraulic saw, the blade buried in his incorporeal chest.

Tony’s right eye was starting to cramp from his continual wink. It flickered. Dizziness threatened to turn to nausea as the chasm ate up the area around him. 

Fuck fuck  _ fuck— _

He moved carefully backward, a slug’s pace, toward the people gathered in his home. He thought they might have moved, ever so slightly. 

“Hello?” Tony said, his voice shaking. “Can any of you hear me? Hello? The ghost is panicking, it’s never been a ghost before…”

Was that what this was? Had he….

Was he dead?  
No, he couldn’t be. He wouldn’t accept that, he _couldn’t—_ not least because he absolutely would _not_ deal with this as an afterlife. When Tony died, it’d be over. He’d be able to sleep, to truly think of nothing at all, to _rest:_ not any of this half-alive haunting consciousness bullshit. He refused to deal with this for eternity. It was unacceptable. 

There had to be another explanation, something he  _ remembered.  _ Tony closed his eyes, trying to concentrate on what he felt instead of what he saw. 

He felt the Gem.

His eyes were opening again, his hands raising once more; Tony stared at the rock glowing innocently within his fingers. Resting on his palm.

Completely. 

The aura that usually surrounded the Stone was gone, and it lay directly against his skin. Tony could feel its remarkably smooth surface, like the shining wetness of a polished river stone, but with the bite of the edge of broken glass. And the more he looked, the more he could truly see the glow of its power—

The glow that came from him.

Tony’s eyes widened, and the cry that crawled from his lips tasted of cinnamon and onyx. 

He was using the Stone, it was using him, and he’d never dropped anything faster than he did in that moment. 

But the Gem didn’t fall. It hovered cheekily in the air where his hand had been, unresponsive to physics in any way. Then again, Tony didn’t seem to be responding to those rules either. The thought was vague and separated as Tony stared at the spinning Infinity Stone, its light pulsing across his face. 

He could feel the rhythm in his soul, in what should have been his heart.  _ Time… lost… home… _

Tony looked around again, alternating between his closed eyes. Two flickering, frozen worlds, but he didn’t seem connected to either. Trapped in limbo in some plane between them. 

He hated it. 

But it didn’t feel wrong—somehow, when he closed his eye to view the chasm, it didn’t feel alien. And that was what scared Tony, more than the Gem, more than frozen time; the memories pulling at the edge of his mind, the ones he couldn’t quite recall, were terrifying. 

This didn’t feel like a mistake, didn’t feel foreign. And that made it all the more urgent that he  _ get the fuck out. _

Swallowing his hesitation, yanking on his determination, Tony reached out to the Stone again. He wrapped his fingers around it, and it came with him, like it was in this strange world with him. Maybe it was.

“Get me out,” he hissed at it. “I don’t know what this is, I don’t  _ want  _ to know, get me the  _ fuck out.” _

The power didn’t so much as flicker in response. He was helpless to it—at its mercy. As he’d always been. 

He’d never hated magic more than he did in that moment.

As if sensing it, the Gem pulsed faster against his skin, glowed brighter. Taunting him. Or… directing him.

The Infinity Stone. He was using the Time Gem; involuntarily, but it was occurring. He couldn’t seem to stop, couldn’t seem to get the hell  _ back to where he was supposed to be. _ But whatever this was, wherever he’d ended up… maybe it was normal for such a Gem. Maybe this was expected. 

And in his current state, there was only one person who would be able to answer that.

Swallowing hard, Tony turned toward the far wall, closed his left eye, and willed himself into motion. 

He moved faster than he ever would have expected, accelerating like a bullet through the walls, the hallway, and out into the courtyard. But he didn’t stop; despite the fright that was still crawling up his throat and the ever-increasing warmth of the Gem, Tony pushed his ghostly body faster. There seemed no limit to his acceleration, and nothing in either of the worlds behind his eyes stopped him. They merged when he got to New York, showing different people, but mostly the same buildings. 

So it took him hardly any time at all to find his way to 177A Bleecker Street. Where he promptly ran into the first thing that had resisted him.

Tony slammed into a wall of invisible perception, an incorporeal speed-bump which somehow took his faster-than-time approach to a more civil drift. He coughed, dizzy from the deceleration, and it smelled like emeralds. 

He took the speed-bump as a good thing; the power of this fucked up Sanctum had at least affected him. Maybe there was something he could figure out in here, if Strange was as frozen as Peter and the rest of the crew had been. 

Carefully, Tony drifted through the front door, settling into the wide-open foyer he remembered from his first unfortunate visit to this place. In his hand, the Gem seemed to purr. Tony almost dropped it again.

Alternating eyes, Tony took in what he could see in each overlay. One showed an empty room where the other, the chasm’s world, showed two frozen youths, caught in the midst of an earnest conversation. Tony didn’t recognize either of them.

Closing his fist tighter on the Stone and swallowing his hesitancy, Tony began to explore the building.

* * *

 

Jerky astral form movements, a hesitance to his stance. The curve of confusion to strong, even shoulders. Short stature made up for by the height of his hovering. Three whorls of hair rejecting their part as he floated awkwardly down the hall. The determined feathering of his jaw. The quirk of his chin and the curve of his ear, the smooth skin behind it. The edge of a cheekbone, the scar that brushed it, the darkened shadow of facial hair dusting the edge. The hint of amber eyes peering carefully through the hall. 

_ Please.  _

“Tony?”

* * *

 

The word was unmistakable, despite the warbling of this ethereal world around Tony. Relieved to hear his name, to be seen at all, Tony didn’t hesitate to turn.

He wasn’t surprised by who he saw, but the who seemed quite surprised by him. Strange was staring at Tony, transparent and floating identically to him, though missing his possessed bedsheet. He’d shed his robes as well, now clad in what seemed to be more civilian garments, and whatever ring-thing he’d been wearing two days ago was gone. But the stance was the same, and tired eyes widened as Tony’s gaze met them. 

“Thank  _ God, _ ” Tony huffed, floating jerkilly forward toward his fellow ghost. “Whatever trip ride this is, wizard, I’d like to get off.”

Strange didn’t move, eyes scouring Tony’s form, lingering for a moment on the hand in which he clenched the Gem. Concentrating, Tony managed to stop the drifting of his body before he ran into the man. He brandished his fist. The Time Gem gleamed almost happily as he uncurled his fingers, and Tony glowered at it before speaking.

“Is this  _ normal  _ for your Stone?” he asked. “I seriously didn’t sign up for the spirit-journey when Loki dropped it. Am I  _ in  _ time or something? Why am I seeing two worlds? What’s that light behind my eyelids? Where is this, besides, y’know, the Sanctum? Can I get out of here? Is it—”

Hands on his face, a whisper of a touch, cupping his jaw and brushing his cheek.

Tony broke off, too astonished to be offended by Strange’s movements. The man’s shaking fingers were gentle, hesitant, and so hauntingly careful, as though Tony might fade away with the barest of whispers. He almost couldn’t feel the light touch. 

Strange’s hands were shaking harder, now.

And suddenly, Tony saw the age etched across the man before him, the greater hollowness of Strange’s face, the gauntness of his form. This wasn’t the wizard Tony had met three days ago—this was someone old and powerful and different, with exhaustion in his eyes…

And a boundless, overwhelming joy that Tony couldn’t look away from. 

“Strange?” Tony asked, flinching back a bit. “What are you…”

_ “Tony,”  _ the man murmured, like a vow, like a prayer. 

And then he was rocking back, both of them were rocking back in the nothingness surrounding them, as Strange wrapped his arms around Tony with vibrant energy. Tony’s words strangled off into startled squeak, all the weight of an overzealous wizard careening into him.

“It’s you,” the wizard breathed, a disbelieving laugh beneath the words. 

“Uh,” Tony coughed. He awkwardly returned the much taller man’s embrace, thoroughly taken aback at this point. 

Long spine curled, Strange’s hands spread wide against Tony’s shoulder blades, as though still trying to convince himself Tony was real. He was a good hugger, Tony thought detachedly. 

“I’m sorry,” Strange mumbled. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Vishanti, I—I missed you so much, Tony, I shouldn’t have—I didn’t— _ I’m so sorry.” _

The words did nothing to dull the bafflement Tony had only sunk deeper into. Uncomfortable, the mechanic shifted his weight and tried to ease himself out of the embrace. 

“Uh, Strange,” he managed. “Not gonna lie, I have… no idea…”

Just as quickly as he had moved, Strange was retreating. He cleared his throat awkwardly and looked away. “Right, uh, yes,” the wizard said. He sounded flustered. “I just… you must be from the splinter dimension.”

“That’s right.” Tony’s words still came slowly, haltingly. 

Strange still wasn’t looking at him. “Um. Yeah. I’d hoped the shared astral dimension would work this way, but I wasn’t sure…” Another clearing of the throat. “I wasn’t sure anyone but me would manage to actually use the Stone.”

“Honestly not sure how I managed it,” Tony admitted. “I just caught it.”

Strange hummed, shifting his weight. Fidgeting—the unflappable, composed sorcerer was  _ fidgeting.  _ “Was it the first time you touched it?”

Tony frowned, thinking back. It shouldn’t have been, but… “Yeah,” he finally said. “I think so.”

“Maybe it recognized you. Let you in.”

“Why would an Infinity Stone recognize me? I’d never even heard their proper name before a week or so ago!”

Strange looked up abruptly. “A week?”

“Yeah, a week. Your idiot little emissary and Parker thought it’d be far more efficient to try and trick me than just tell me straight-up what was happening. So it took a while.”

“Two years?”

_ “Two— _ of course not two years!” Tony floated backward, rejecting the very thought of Peter fraternizing with an Asgardian secretly for months, let alone years. “It’s been like five weeks.”

“Oh.”

“What does that mean?” Tony had half a mind to sigh.

“It just means the timelines are correlated… differently than I expected.” Strange explained. He was staring intently at Tony again; when Tony raised an eyebrow, he dragged his gaze away. “It’s not a problem, just changes my expectations.”

“New York doesn’t really look all that bothered by the apocalypse you seem so intent on stopping,” Tony observed. 

“Hm.” The wizard didn’t elaborate.

“Where even are we right now?”

That Strange did answer, and quite promptly. “An astral plane—the conventional one from my universe, but one astral projectors from your universe can enter if the Stone knocks them towards it enough. It’s a result of our artificially parallel timelines.”

“Perfectly not confusing,” Tony sighed. 

It was starting to dawn on him that he was talking to  _ the  _ Strange, the actual, future one that had caused all this confusion. The one that had taken the risk, chosen Loki, given them all so little information. The one that had worked through every kink and ripple of this insane plan. 

The one that had embraced him like he was the most precious thing in the multiverse.

Tony could ask Strange anything, everything. But the only thing that came out of his mouth was, “How do I get out of here?” 

“You stop astral projecting,” Strange said, as though that explained everything. “Return to your material form.”

“I have to haul ass all the way back to the Compound?”

Strange shook his head. “No, you just have to… close your eyes here, and open them in your body.”

Tony wanted to yank his hair out. “I have no  _ idea  _ how one goes about that, doc.”

Strange touched behind his ear, smiling a little. “I can send you back.”

“Fantastic.” But not yet. “Why’d you choose Loki?”  
“Because he was the only one I could choose.” Strange answered easily.

“What happens when the dimensions merge?”

“They fill the gaps in each other, the balance tipping toward beings or objects with more integral parts of the timeline and stronger—”

“Dimensional signatures,” Tony finished.

Strange’s mouth quirked up. “Me from the past figured it out pretty quick, then?”  
“He had help.”

“Wong?”

“Who?”

“Nevermind.”

Tony huffed, tasting the Gem once again. He fidgeted, fingers brushing over the surface, and glanced around the hallway again. “Where are the rest of the Stones?”  
“Depends. What’s the date?”

“November.”

Strange raised a translucent eyebrow. “Year?”  
“2016.” 

“Hm. I don’t know about Power, Space, or Reality. Mind should be with you by now. Soul is on… Nebula said Vormir on Titan? I don’t know where that is, though. And I should have Time.”

“You don’t. Or at least, you haven’t shown it to us, or even mentioned it.”

Strange hummed. “I wouldn’t have, if it’s November.”

“Why?” Tony questioned, drifting forward slightly. “What happens to you in November 2016?”

Strange just looked at him, eyes that dizzying mix of sadness and controlled delight. The only adjective Tony could think of to describe the expression was bittersweet.

Instead of pressing the question, though he decidedly desired to, Tony returned to his rapid-fire questions. “Do I need Steve Rogers to defeat Thanos or can I ignore his star-spangled ass?”

“You may be able to accomplish your mission without him,” Strange said, and the words were slow, picked carefully. Tony nearly imploded with the need to know why. “But he was important to the titan’s death in my time.”

Tony frowned. “I thought you said you lost!”

“We killed Thanos,” Strange said flatly. There was the drawl, the controlled emotion Tony knew from his dimension’s wizard. “That doesn’t mean we won.”

Tony watched him for a long moment. One of Strange’s feet was angled directly toward him. Then he sighed, “fair enough. Spaceship?”

“Imperative.”

“Can I build something efficient enough in time?”

Strange smiled—soft and clear and so shatteringly different from the smirk Tony had begun to associate with the wizard. “I doubt your abilities not at all.”

“I’m immensely flattered,” Tony huffed sarcastically. Before he could consider the possibility that Strange’s words had been as genuine as they sounded, he asked the next question. “Can I keep Peter here—I mean, on earth? Away from… everything?”

“You tried that,” Strange murmured. “In my dimension. It didn’t work.  _ And I’m sorry.” _

The last words were quiet, so quiet that Tony didn’t think he’d been meant to hear them. But his stomach turned to ice at the tone, his hands clenching.

“Is he… he’s not dead.”

Strange’s gaze snapped to him again. “No! No, Peter’s… fine.”

“You hesitated,” Tony observed, stepping forward. 

“None of us are fine, okay?” Strange snarled, sudden and snappish and furious. 

Tony retreated like a rubber-band snapping, and Strange’s fire disappeared as soon as it had come.

“Sorry.” The man had stopped looking at him again. “That was uncalled for.”

Tony dismissed him with a wave of his hand. “How do I use the Stones to merge the dimensions?”

_ “You  _ won’t be,” Strange deadpanned, his words edged with finality. “All six Stones and the alternate Time Stone as a compass in one s—snap? No. I’ll be doing it.”

“What?”

“Using that much power will kill you. As finally as decapitation, as unavoidably as age, it will kill you.” Strange’s eyes were hazy as he said the words, like he wasn’t really looking at Tony. Or like he was looking at so much more than him. 

“So I’m supposed to let  _ you  _ do it? Un-fucking-likely.” 

Strange just shook his head, again and again and again. “You always say that,” he breathed, the words slightly ragged. “But you don’t get to make the sacrifice play. Not this time, Stark.”

“I’d really rather not,” Tony agreed, his jaw clenching. “But you can’t—”

“You’re dead, Tony.” 

A pause.

“What?”

“You’re dead, in this universe. You can’t die in yours, or you won’t be coming back with the merge.” Strange’s voice was utterly emotionless, no inflection whatsoever. 

Tony had nothing to say in response.

_ ‘It’s you.’ _

“Is that all?” Strange inquired softly, after a long moment.

“I… for now.” Tony needed to get back to his ‘material form’, think this over, hopefully with Rhodey as a sounding board. “But now I know we can interrogate you.”

“Anytime,” Strange murmured.

And Tony couldn’t handle it another minute. “Why does everything you say always sound like it has a double meaning?” he demanded. 

“You don’t want me to answer that,” Strange huffed. There was no mirth to it. “Trust me.”

“I don’t.”

“I know.” 

“Just—” Tony forced himself to take a breath, to still his irritation. “Just send me back, alright?”

Strange nodded, some mix of desolation and relief on his face as he moved toward Tony again. Restraining himself from rocking backwards away from the assault, Tony waited. 

Strange’s hand was shaking when he laid it on Tony’s chest, right against his sternum. 

“I’m just going to knock you back down an energy level,” Strange explained, voice slightly tight. “Alright?”

“Alright.”

Strange’s eyes closed, the lids flickering down over his ghostly form. He took a breath, and Tony felt the prickle of perception against his form.

_ ‘I missed you so much, Tony.’ _

Suddenly, Tony was gripping the wrist before him, dragging his own eyes open. “Wait.”

Strange obliged, watching him unreadably. 

“Did I know you?” Tony wondered to the empty space between them. “In your world?”

“No,” Strange murmured. “Not really.”

And with nothing more than a flicker, Tony was opening his eyes in a body crashing to the floor of his lab.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter 22, if you're confused. :) 
> 
> In other news, *frantic beat of hands slapping on table* THERE WAS A REUNION THEY SAW EACH OTHER DID YOU SEE HOW HAPPY AND CONFUSED EVERYONE WAS WHY DO I DO THIS TO MYSELF AND MY CHILDREN ARG--


	64. Aerodynamic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> He just couldn't stay away.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“That’s thirty-four hours,” Stephen was quick to specify as he slipped through the door of the workshop. 

He took in the wide array of impossibilities it contained with a sweep of his gaze. Scanning the tools of the room, he filed away each with an attached recognition of the stunning potential it possessed. No wonder Stark Industries was the lead in  _ every _ field reaching toward the future, if this was what a single workshop held. From holograms to propane, Stephen saw everything. The living inhabitants glanced up on his arrival, and he heard his voice echoing from the ceiling, reminding him of the ongoing call and the phone he was still holding to his ear.

But the award for most unexpected went to the screen displaying the somewhat amused, but unmistakable face of Shuri of Wakanda. 

Stephen stared at her for half a heartbeat, then moved on.

Dropping the phone, he let FRIDAY hang up when she saw fit and positioned himself aside the door. “Couldn’t even last two days without calling me again.”

“Oh, apologies for involving you in world-altering dimensional developments,” Stark snapped. He looked a bit pale, and he was watching Stephen far too closely for his liking. Neither had any effect on the ease of his words. 

“I’m lost,” Shuri said, raising her hand on the screen. “Who is that?”

“That’s the wizard we were talking about,” Peter explained. He was perched on the far table next to two other teenagers, 

“Sorcerer,” Loki and Stephen corrected simultaneously. 

“As opposed to magician, as opposed to warlock, as opposed to enchanter,” Potts huffed, looking entirely unimpressed. “These words are called  _ synonyms  _ and their interchanging use has no effect on the meaning of a sentence, so can we get to the point?”

“Actually,” Vision interjected, “a word’s connotation can have a rather drastic effect on interpretation.”  
“Yeah, like ‘cottage in the forest’ versus ‘cabin in the woods,’” the squat male teenager recited.

“Oh, I know this one.” Peter straightened. “‘Butt dial’ versus ‘booty call’!”

On the screen, Shuri smirked. “‘Forgive me father, for I have sinned’ versus ‘Sorry Daddy, I’ve been naughty.’”

Silence.

“What the  _ fuck?”  _ Stark demanded, gaze whipping to the teenagers.

“Tumblr,” the female teenager contributed. 

“How about we  _ move on from that,”  _ Colonel Rhodes managed through gritted teeth—from guarded laughter or irritation, Stephen couldn’t tell— “to the part where we get an actual explanation?” 

“Please,” Stephen agreed, leaning back against the edge of the doorway. 

“Right, yes,” Stark sighed, waving a hand. The wave abruptly morphed into a toss, and Stephen had just enough time to lunge forward and catch the Time Gem as the man  _ hurled it across the room.  _

He opened his mouth to remind them all  _ yet again  _ that an Infinity Stone was not to be trifled with, but Stark beat him to the words. 

“Yes, yes, power of the multiverse incarnate and all that, don’t start. Have you used it?”

Stephen pulled his perception away from the sickening aura resting in his palm, like a child shying away from an animal. “Assuming your refer to this Gem, no, I haven’t.”

“Are you using it now? Just touching it?”

“Of course not.” Stephen opened his weakly fisted fingers. He carefully moved his hand so the green light didn’t shine across his wrists, concentrated in the center of his palm, and watched suspended object slowly spinning. “The Time Stone must be channeled like the mystic arts for any sort of control over its power.”

“About that.” Stark shifted where he was slumped in the spinny chair.

Stephen closed his eyes. “Don’t say it.”

“I touched it? Accidentally? And some really weird shit went down that I’d very much like you to explain.”

It took all of Stephen’s self control not to snap that he’d  _ warned  _ them, that this ignorance and flippant disregard was going to and had already put them in danger. But this wasn’t about  _ I-told-you-so _ ’s. Even if he had. 

Instead, he looked away from the Gem in his hand and drawled, “Whatever it did, you’re probably fine. I sense no residue of a time loop or directed spatial paradox, and none of us have been sucked into a past timeline and another split universe or I  _ really  _ would have noticed.”

“Unstable dimensional openings? Temporal manipulation?” Stark raised an eyebrow. “Been there done that, wiz. And I have returned in one piece to ask how and when and  _ what  _ just happened.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Loki dropped the Stone; I caught it, and suddenly I was a ghost and the Round Table here—” Stark gestured at the individuals around him— “was frozen. Or at least, moving very slowly.”

Stephen frowned, cocking his head slightly. “You astral projected? The Gem shouldn’t do that.”

“Oh, it gets better,” Stark huffed. His hands fisted and released at his sides, almost as though he was anxious—or angry. “Through one eye, I could see this. The Compound, the Avengers, whatever. But through the other? I could see a different dimension—a dimension years into the future. Loki and the Gem’s world: the Stalk.”

Stephen straightened, as fast as if lightning had just struck down his spine. “You  _ entered  _ the shared astral plane? Between—you saw the mother dimension?”

“Now colloquially known as the Stalk,” Stark agreed.

“I’m not calling it the Stalk.”

“Too late!” Peter contributed cheerfully. 

Stephen shuffled forward, then back in an awkward pacing motion. “Using the Gem shifted you up energy levels, directing you into—”

“The conventional astral plane for the Stalk,” Stark finished on the trailing end of a sigh. “A result of the artificially paired timelines.”

Stephen raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t realize you were an expert in multiversial signatures and shared planar dimensions.”

“I’m not,” Stark admitted. “But you are.”

Stephen stared at him for a long second, trying to process the fact that he might possibly have just been complimented, before realizing what Stark really meant to imply. The latter was no less cause for staring. 

“You met him.”

“You from the future? The cause of this whole mess? I did indeed.” Stark ran a hand through his hair before bracing his chin against it. 

“How long did you spend there?” Stephen wondered, aggressively  _ not  _ letting his mind drift to questions of what future Strange was like. Whether or not he admitted it, he was fearful of the answers. 

“Long enough.” Stark shivered. “If I never have to see another enchantment or spell or bullshit magic dingus again, it’ll be too soon.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Stephen replied sarcastically. But he was relieved he’d remembered to portal out of sight of the man anyway.

Stark ignored him. “You from the future provided a lot of helpful insight, believe it or not.”

“I’m shocked, personally,” the female teenager contributed. Stephen really needed introductions, but that was for a different time. And perhaps, by some miracle, he wouldn’t ever have to talk to any of these people again. 

“Going off-planet is a requirement,” Stark elaborated, “so I’m going to have to get on that. You also indicated that Steve Rogers was, unfortunately, a likely necessity.”

On the screen, Shuri hummed. “That could be awkward.”

“It’s already awkward,” Colonel Rhodes sighed.

Stark showed no indication of hearing either of them, his gaze still directed up and to the left in pictionary recall. Stephen silenced the part of his mind that wanted to diagnose the man’s learning language from that.

“You confirmed what merging the dimensions would do, and you gave me a couple of heart attacks relating to this kid—” Stark swung a finger at Peter— “being and not being dead, respectively.”

Peter gave an awkward set of jazz hands in the background. Funny, Stephen’s song of the day was Duke Ellington’s “It Don’t Mean a Thing.”

“But! The most important update! Saving the best for last.” Stark cracked his knuckles dramatically. “I have Infinity Stone information.”

“Fantastic,” Stephen deadpanned. The one in his hand had started to pulse, inviting him to touch it, to use it. Stephen put it down on the nearest shelving unit.

“Mind, we have,” Stark said, pointing at the Vision. “Time, you have, despite your unwillingness to confirm, and Soul is apparently on someplace called Vormir.”

A pause, as everyone looked to Loki.

“What?” the Asgardian demanded.

“You’re the space guy.” Shuri leaned closer to the screen. “Where’s that?”

Loki glared at them with something between disbelief and frustration. “There’s a sextillion or so planets in Asgard’s observable universe. You expect me to know all of them by name? Especially when each species has their own separate designation for them?”

“If it’s home to an Infinity Stone, maybe it’s a more well-known place.” Stark shrugged. 

“Maybe so.” Loki’s expression did not change. “But I wouldn’t know.”

“You knew about Pluto!” Peter protested. Stephen wondered what he’d missed.

“It was a  _ required project  _ for universal studies when I was sixty years of age,” Loki sighed. “If you desire random universal facts, talk to Thor. He is the one who took classes on communicating with trees.”

“If we ever run into Point Break, that’s the first thing I’ll do.” Stark uncrossed his legs, spinning around in his chair to draw attention back to him, again. “The point is, we’ve got more information now. Loki knows where the Space Stone is, and the vague location of the Power Stone. As soon as we finish the neuromatrix for Vision, we’ll have two of four and a good next step to take.”

On screen, Shuri sat up. “Neuromatrix?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. “In order to separate the non sequential neurons from the Stone’s influence, so Vision can live without it, and still be Vision.”

“A surgical procedure?” Shuri looked interested. 

“Combined with a redefining of the connections as code, so most of the editing can happen digitally,” Stark elaborated. 

“Why all the trouble, if the neurons are collective?”

“They aren’t.”

Shuri raised an eyebrow, and Stark smirked slightly. “Oh great sovereign of the Wakandan technologies, tell me what I’m missing,” he said.

“I’m just saying, if you transplanted with a collectively operating neural system, things would be  _ so  _ much more organized.” Shuri crossed her arms, craning around Stark to get a view of the android behind him. Vision waved. 

Shuri’s eyes narrowed, then she sat back with a satisfied grin. “Is that vibranium infused with the tissue? Reinforcing it? Tell me it is.”

“It is,” Potts answered. 

“I can do it,” Shuri said, nodding as her grin turned to a smirk. 

“What?” Vision cocked his head.

“I can do it. Sort out the neurons, like untangling string.”

Stephen found himself migrating forward slightly, drawn by a curious interest. He still lingered a few paces outside the group, but he could better see the princess on the screen.

“How?” Stark asked—not a demand, just an inquisitive question. Almost excited. 

“A matrix adjustment. I can realign the neurons using photon needle kept controlled by the vibranium casing of our good android’s cells.”

“Is that precise enough?” Peter wondered. 

“A  _ photon needle?”  _

“Can’t say I’ve heard of those,” Colonel Rhodes said pointedly. 

Shuri’s smile could either have been condescending or reassuring, depending on one’s mood at the time. “It’s a laser formed from concentrated rays, using the particle nature of electromagnetic waves. I can edit things on a cellular scale, though I’m working to try and get the precision down to molecular.”

“Microsurgery,” Stephen blurted before he could stop himself.

He became the sudden cynosure as all eyes turned to him.

“That’s revolutionary. A cellular editing tool—with the right technique and time, you could realign nerves, capillaries. You could cut away a tumor down to the last infected cell! With development, it’d be almost too easy to target bacterial clusters, viral infections, fungal invasions. You could stitch together a damaged brain or redesign a failing heart. Antibiotic resistance could stop looming apocalyptically on the horizon if a  _ surgeon  _ could fight an infection.”

“I… yeah, that’s true.” Shuri frowned—in thought, not emotion. “The needles are designed for nonliving precision work. I mostly use them to position and program nanotech when I need a specific action that the stem nanites won’t provide. But as medical tools… hang on, I’m writing this down.”

Halfway through her scribbling, she looked up again. “Who  _ are  _ you?”

“Doctor Stephen Strange,” Stephen said, inclining his head slightly. “At your service.”

“Oh! I think I’ve heard of you.” The princess pursed her lips, glaring aggressively at him as though his image might help spark her memory. He hoped not.

Tucking shaking hands behind him, Stephen rocked back onto his heels. 

“So,” Stark said in the silence that followed, “if you’ve got the Mind Stone, I can focus on our spaceship problem—”

“No, no no no,” Shuri interrupted, raising a hand. “Nope. You don’t get to design a spaceship without me.”

“Can I get in on this?” Peter raised his hand as well. 

The squat, nameless teen agreed eagerly. “I’m thinking Malinem Falcon, with a bit of X-Wing thrown in for the double-wing aerodynamics—”

“Please, stop,” Stark interrupted, a hand coming up to cover his brow. “No  _ Star Wars.  _ And it’s  _ space;  _ it doesn’t need to be aerodynamic.”

“No air, yes,” the nameless boy agreed, “but there’s still getting off the ground—”

Stephen watched the exchange with something between resigned contempt and amusement, his senses still prickling in the proximity of the Time Gem. He wondered if he could get Stark to build another Eye. It wouldn’t be difficult, and he could do the inscriptions afterwards to help ground the Gem in any material the man happened to use. 

Or maybe Stark could understand the shaping needed—the Gem had let him in, after all. The shared astral plane made sense, the dimensional kick into it by the Gem’s power made sense, even talking to an alternate Stephen was understandable by universal rules. What didn’t make sense was why Stark had been able to  _ channel  _ the Gem’s power, to actually use it instead of simply perceive it. And that look he’d given Stephen upon his arrival…

There was something he wasn’t telling them. 

The conversation before him had drifted away from spaceships, and returned of its own accord to something more relevant. 

“Would it be legal to travel on a medical lease?” the female teenager was wondering. “For Vision?”

“I am unsure that my treatment would classify, as I am not fully human,” the android said. “It might be more hoops to jump through.”

“Well, if we can get you, Rhodey, and I through in that fashion, it could be easier to secure the kids in on educational exchange.” Stark was spinning around in that chair again, with enough speed to make Stephen vicariously dizzy. 

“I suppose you can’t just show up,” Shuri agreed. “The whole world would want to know why and how and where you booked a flight.” 

“The perks of being world-famous.” Stark raised his hands in what could have been a shrug or, equally likely, an invitation for applause

Stephen cleared his throat. No one noticed, or at least no one acknowledged. 

“What am I supposed to  _ do  _ while we wait for the democratic process?” Stark huffed. 

“Initiate your own democratic process.” Shuri looked rather unimpressed. 

“Damage Control,” Potts said pointedly. “Probably gonna need legal access to the Chitauri vault. You’re allowed in; you just have to get confirmation.”

Stephen cleared his throat again. 

“Can I at least sketch up some lightspeed calculations— Actually fuck that, I’m not asking for permission.” Stark waved his arms like some sort of demented parrot. “I shall be sketching up some lightspeed calculations and you  _ cannot stop me.” _

Stephen touched his palm to his chin, raising his eyebrows. Peter glanced at him.

_ I’ll wait.  _

“Lightspeed? The Chitauri?” Loki scoffed. “They move in hyperspace and through jump points. If you intend to use their technology in your frankly quaint environment, you’ll have to calculate for far more than that.”

“Jump points?” Shuri leaned close again. “Faster than lightspeed? The materials needed to withstand that sort of pressure—”

“I certainly don’t have,” Stark finished with her. “But you might.”

_ I’ll wait. _

“I guess that leaves the calculations, yet again, up to me.” Shuri gave a splittingly innocent smile. 

“You seem to forget that mathematical operations do not change in effectiveness based on spacial location.”

“Yeah, but you can’t implement them.”

“Oh no,” Peter said with exaggerated emotion, staring directly at Stephen. “If only we could get to Wakanda.”

“Working on that, kid,” Stark said, before turning back to the screen. “If we—”

“No,” Peter interrupted, watching Stephen even more conspicuously, “ _ what if  _ there was a convenient, instantaneous way to shuffle between here and Wakanda without anyone knowing in the meantime of the democratic process?”

The female teenager followed his gaze, eyes lighting up when they fell on Stephen. “Oh, right. Yeah, what if we could do that?”

“Just pop back and forth, instantaneous travel. Teleportation’s lame though, so why not use a gateway?”

Stephen tried and failed to hold in his smirk, raising his eyebrows as everyone swiveled to look at him. He didn’t really blame the assorted geniuses for their glossing over his capabilities, as they’d been very clear that there had been enough magic today already. But this was urgent, important; surely it could be considered justified.

Peter continued, his legs swinging over the edge of the desk. “Or, I don’t know, a portal?”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh yeah, this'll go just fANTASTICALLY--
> 
> Thanks for reading! :)


	65. A Robbed Moment

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Slow clap for this absolutely Great plan...

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Tony’s head was buzzing in five hundred or so directions. Each of them pinged off in several completely separate strings of thought, snagging on different memories and obstacles and awarenesses. The only way it manifested was in the clenching of his fingers, in and out and in and out and in against the chair.

Even as he spoke of engineering with the princess of Wakanda, Tony was considering wordings for the acquisition of his necessary Damage Controlled tech. He was thinking of the Stone in Vision’s forehead, what they’d do with it when they’d finished its removal. Part of him was still watching Loki’s every movement, rewriting old assumptions about the Asgardian. The calculations he’d spoken of were already etching themselves out in his mind. 

But the majority of his thoughts were still trying to shake away the feeling of weightlessness from his from, the whisper of green light in his veins, the sensation of lightning beneath his eyelids. That was the part setting his fingers curling. 

He’d set FRIDAY on calling Strange practically the moment he’d come slamming into the proper dimension, thinking something would become clearer if he had this timeline’s wizard to interrogate. Instead, seeing the aloof, somewhat flippant Strange had Tony dizzy all over again. 

How much time had passed? And what… what sweeping event had turned this Strange, still standing separate from the rest of them, into the tired, genuine Strange that had been so pleased to see a dead man?

Part of him wished he had stayed in that astral plane to ask more questions, to inquire until he knew everything. The rest determined that the time he’d spent was far too much. 

With the aggressively pinging thoughts, Tony didn’t manage to catch the conversation before it drifted into dangerous territory. And he certainly didn’t know what to say when it got there.

“Or, I don’t know, a portal?” Peter suggested pointedly, jerking a thumb in Strange’s direction. 

Right. That. Yet more magic that would be ever-so-helpful for their current predicament. Not that it made Tony any more partial to its use. 

Someone else spoke before he could; the boy, Leeds. “Wait, what? Did you say…”

“He did,” Rhodey confirmed. Tony saw his friend’s sharp eyes slide to him for a moment, lingering. “Apparently that’s something being a wizard entails.”

“You’re… you’re not a real wizard.” Leeds could only shake his head. “I don’t—that’s not—”

“Ned,” the Jones girl interrupted, “you’re standing in a room full of Avengers, with the most powerful relic in the universe sitting on _that_ shelf—” she pointed— “next to your best friend who just so happens to be Spider-Man talking about _dimensional merging_ and a _multiverse paradox_ with princess Shuri of Wakanda. Is magic really so far-fetched?”

_ Unfortunately not,  _ Tony thought with a huff. 

“Okay but…” Ned waved his hands as if puppeting some elusive story. “It’s magic.”

“It’s a channel of energy in a different way.” Strange spoke for the first time in a while—voice still that dispassionate drawl that Tony didn’t trust or find true in the slightest. “Like you turn chemical energy into electrical, I turn dimensional into thermal, electromagnetic, or other kinds of dimensional.”

“Normal people don’t do that.” Leeds was still frowning. 

Vision hummed thoughtfully, and Rhodey choked on a laugh. “He does have a point.”

Strange just gestured to himself, shaking hands gleaming pale in the workshop light. “Do I look like a normal person.” It wasn’t a question. 

Tony was rather thankful for this tangent directing attention away from him—and allowing him to frantically consider what his next step was going to be. If Strange could portal around the world, could carve open a gateway directly in the center of his lab…

All the technologies of Wakanda would be within reach, quite literally. All the technologies, the attention of King T’Challa, unobvious access to the Rogue Avengers, without even having to make a phone call or a bulletin update. They could work in tandem with the ‘democratic process’ for efficiency and convenience. 

All it would take was a step. 

And Tony hated, hated everything about this crippling hesitation that had his hands clenching double-time against his sides, but that step was a lot harder than one might think. He didn’t like gateways, even when he could see the other side.  _ Especially  _ when he could see the other side. He didn’t like gateways, and he didn’t like magic, and he did  _ not  _ want to find out if moving through one was still a trigger. 

That’s what he was supposed to do; know the triggers, and avoid them. But this one didn’t seem avoidable…

“Can I have a dimensional wizard?” Shuri asked from the screen behind Tony. “Please? That would be unbelievably convenient.”

“I’m not an Uber service,” Strange sighed. 

“What’s an Uber service?” Loki inquired. 

“Nevermind,” Pepper sighed, clapping softly to redirect the increasingly chaotic room. “The point is Strange can get us there and back.”

“In time for—” Leeds cut himself off. “It’s a portal.  _ Instantaneous travel.  _ Oh my god, that’s so handy!”

“I’m not…” Strange gave up halfway through the sentence, and Tony didn’t blame him. 

“I’ll turn off the Weird Shit alarms so they don’t go off when you start projecting alien dimensional energies into my lab,” Shuri said, reaching off-screen for something.

“Wait, wait.” Rhodey raised his hands, and Tony breathed an inward sigh of relief and gratitude. “We haven’t decided if we’re actually going anywhere.”

“What’s there to decide?” Shuri cocked her head. It wasn’t a malicious comment—she just sounded curious. Tony was liking her more and more, not that he’d expected anything different. “You need to get here. Your friend Stonehead needs to get here. You possess a sorcerer capable of doing so. There’s no downside to popping over here for a quick look around.”

“But…” Rhodey glanced at Tony again, looking somewhat helpless. He couldn’t argue—there was nothing to argue about. 

“She’s right,” Tony said, forcing his hands to still against his sides. He nodded to Rhodey, to Pepper, before either of them could speak out again. They needed this; his distrust of doorways shouldn’t stop progress. He wouldn’t let it.

When he stood, pulling his shirt down to straighten out its wrinkles, he found Strange watching him. The sorcerer’s eyes looked hazel in the shadows of the workshop, and Tony couldn’t read expression there upon a glance. He didn’t dare try again.

At least that was something that had stayed the same between this Strange and the future one—neither of them made any sense. And when they wanted to be, both seemed carved of stone. 

“What are you waiting for?” Tony said, using the words as an excuse to try and get a bearing on Strange again. 

The man just nodded, turning his attention back to the room. “Alright, alright,” he huffed, raising both hands. 

The looping streaks of his fingers were even, drawing sparkling lines of brownish light behind them. Tony swallowed as the edges connected. The perfect circle they formed was small—too small for people to climb through. 

But before he could ask, something came whizzing  _ out  _ of the small gateway, just barely missing Strange’s face as it shot up and over and settled behind him. Red and heavy and thick, Tony recognized it as the sorcerer’s missing Cloak. The thing crept up against Strange’s shoulders, lifting a collar as if to survey the other inhabitants, then curled against the man’s neck. 

“It gets irritated when I travel more than a thousand miles without it,” he said by way of explanation. 

“Wait, wait—” Leeds began.

“Yes, the Cloak is alive,” Loki snapped before the boy could continue his clarifying blubbering. “Do not fall behind this race.”

Peter chuckled, elbowing his friend. “Yeah, Ned, get with the program.” 

“I am so… I am… bgfff!” Ned finished his exclamation with a gargle of excitement, sitting back against the table and Peter.  

Loki narrowed his eyes at the two of them as though trying to decode a particularly biased political article. 

Gaze skating over the eight of them, Strange let the smaller portal fizzle shut with a wave of his hand. Tony wondered if that was a necessity for the performance of his magic—if some amount of gesturing was needed to channel whatever dimensional energy he kept talking about. 

He wondered if binding a wizard’s hands was enough to protect yourself from their power. 

Despite Tony’s guilt at taking comfort in the thought, he couldn’t help but feel just a tad more secure in having an idea of how to fight back. Strange probably wouldn’t attack him, but you never knew. 

A hand found Tony’s shoulder as another gateway flickered open—appearing both at the edge of the lab and inside the image on the screen at his side. He saw Shuri from two angles as she turned in excited delight toward the sparking circle of light. Tony blinked, for far longer than was natural. 

“Hoooooly shit,” Leeds yelped, pushing off from where he was perched and practically bounding over to the gateway. Peter followed. “This is…”

Peter caught Ned’s wrist when he reached up toward the glowing border, gentle but definitive. “Don’t touch,” he alerted, glancing at Tony.

Tony wasn’t sure whether he should be relieved or disappointed that the kid had misunderstood his reaction to the portal days ago in the Sanctum, when he’d snapped a warning based on nothing but his memories. As it was, he chose relief. It meant he wasn’t too obvious, that he still had a hold on what his actions spoke when his thoughts might scream everything different. 

Shuri, with the caution of a scientist poking a prototype, stuck her hand through the gateway experimentally. She flexed her fingers and frowned. “It feels the same.”

“Most humans can’t sense the dimensional shifts that relate to their position in the universe,” Strange replied instantly. “Only when the distances are considerably longer.”

“It’s here to the other side of the world,” Ms. Jones huffed. “I’d say that’s pretty long.”

“Try here to another galaxy.” Tony couldn’t, and didn’t try, to stop the words. 

The hand on his shoulder—Rhodey’s—squeezed slightly. Tony pretended the movement didn’t ground him significantly. 

Then Shuri stepped through the gateway. 

Tony blinked again, long and ongoing.

“Good to meet you in person, then,” the princess said, sticking out a hand to Ms. Jones. The other girl quirked a smirk and met the hand with a high-five. 

“Good indeed.”

Shuri turned to Strange a moment later, asking, “how long can you keep this open?” 

“As long as necessary.”

“Really?”

The wizard nodded.

“Well then, I won’t say ‘what are we waiting for.’”

Vision interjected, “why not? What  _ are  _ we waiting for?”

Slinking forward from the back of the group, Loki prodded at the edge of the portal, heedless of Peter’s words. “What are we waiting for indeed?”

He was the first to pass into Wakanda, boots clicking on the silvery flooring. Leeds followed, then Shuri and Ms. Jones. Vision trailed after them, golden eyes wide as he scanned everything around him. Glancing at Tony as she moved, Pepper carefully stepped through a moment later. Then Peter—Tony hoped he didn’t flinch as the kid’s footsteps turned from socks on polished concrete to socks on whatever metal and tile wreathed the bottom of Shuri’s lab. 

Nothing happened. Nothing at all. But the hairs on Tony’s neck and shoulders was prickling, the tips of his fingers going cold, his breath speeding. 

“Tones,” Rhodey said quietly. Or maybe Tony just wasn’t hearing him. 

“I’m fine,” Tony managed, jaw clenched, the words hissing through his teeth. “It’s not space, it’s not the Tesseract.”

“We both know that’s not how this works.” Rhodey was looking at him; Tony didn’t look back. He was watching the portal, watching it hang silently in the air like a falcon at the apex of its dive. Waiting. 

Strange was there, standing like a shadow at the side of the room. His gaze wandered to the back of the room, and Tony remembered the Time Gem with the desperation of distraction. 

“I’ll get it,” Tony barked, slipping out of Rhodey’s hold and moving back toward the shelf where Strange had left the object. Too late, he remembered what had happened the last time he touched it. 

But the Time Gem hovered with its usual untouchable aura above his skin. If it had recognized him this time, it had given up on whatever agenda had it sending him into another dimension. The fingers of Tony’s other hands curled around the wire slats of the shelf involuntarily, keeping him from moving back through the workshop. 

The prickle of the gateway’s sparking light sent chills down his spine. Turning to look at it wasn’t any better. 

He knew he looked like he’d seen a ghost, like he was still seeing a ghost. At least only Rhodey could see—the rest had dispersed out of view of the gateway. Except Pepper, lingering near the opening, thousands of miles away and within speaking distance. 

And Strange. 

It was one step. A single step, across a border no wider than a pencil’s width. What the hell was  _ wrong  _ with him—it wasn’t anything like the wormhole. 

Squaring his shoulders, Tony concentrated on releasing his fingers from the shelving. Then he concentrated on moving forward, one step at a time. He could feel his heartbeat. He ignored it. 

Rhodey trotted to stand next to him, and Tony flicked his eyes to acknowledge him, but he didn’t dare stop moving, didn’t dare change his gait for a single step. The gap in spacetime loomed before him, and Tony looked straight through it. He tried to concentrate on something on the Wakandan wall far across the world. He tried to block out the light in his peripheral vision.

At his side, Tony’s nails bit deep into his palms. 

Rhodey took his arm, matching his stride,  _ forcing  _ Tony to keep his own as they grew close, just a step away now, and Tony’s breath ratcheted up in pitch and rhythm, his heart loud in his ears, his fists curling tighter and tighter around themselves, and now they were against it, the floor shifting where the edges of his shoes rested—he could feel heat against his ankles where the sparking light flicked tongues of energy out to ensnare him, and it burned, and Rhodey was moving so Tony couldn’t stop, but  _ god did he need to stop  _ as there was no more room for determination, conviction, logic in the face of the starlight in his eyes—

One step. 

Tony stumbled, his feet carrying him away where his mind told him to observe and take in the wonders of the area around him. Maybe speak, to. At some point, Rhodey had let go of him.

He felt the precise moment when the gateway closed, heard its snap of connection swirl around itself and crawl like a barb-legged scarab into his ear. He felt the claws scrape the inside of his skull. 

There were eyes on him again. He wondered what he must look like, fingers ripping at his ear, trying to shake the insect free. 

  “Tony.” Hands were grabbing his wrist, pulling his arm away from his ears, and they burned too, the wires of his suit sparking beneath the strain, locking down—a cage, not a support, and—

“Tony!”

“Let go of him.” Another voice, not Pepper, not Rhodey. Not the coms flickering into dead sound. 

“What—”

“You’re making it worse,” the voice said again. 

The suit loosened around his wrists, and Tony dropped, one hand shooting up to his ear again. The other splayed on the cold ground next to his knee. Ground, Earth, home. 

“Stark.” The voice was back—it sounded sharp and low. “What’s different?”

_ What? _

“What’s different?”

Different? The ground beneath him—there hadn’t been ground last time. 

“Good. And?”

There was no weight, no dying suit, no pressing shell against the cold. There was no cold, either. 

“And?”

And… and he didn’t hear air whipping at his ears, or the pull of gravity. He wasn’t falling. He’d just walked. 

“You’re right,” the voice said—Tony recognized it as Strange’s. 

“I’m always right,” he huffed. The words were strained, but at least he could feel himself speaking them. 

With that came the self-consciousness, the mortification. Tony went from unaware to far too aware of his position and the curious, confused eyes on his kneeling form. The shadows of Rhodey and Pepper fell across his hands, and Tony stood as quickly as he could. 

He straightened his shirt, his shoulders, his expression, falling beneath a fortification that was all too easy to erect. At the side of the room, Vision was watching him with concern. Shuri wasn’t looking at all, and Tony wondered if she truly hadn’t noticed. He doubted it. Peter just looked confused, glancing between Tony and everywhere and anywhere else.

And then there was Strange. He was standing, just a few seconds after Tony, and moving back. He didn’t look at Tony as the engineer’s gaze bored through him, past him, until there were another pair of eyes catching Tony’s.

Tony saw every ounce of understanding that had fallen across Loki’s emerald gaze, and maybe the smallest hint of sorrow. Of course Loki knew,  _ why wouldn’t he know? _

Tony was working side-by-side with the murderer who had tried to destroy his planet. The god that had put these cracks in his mind, purposefully or not. Tony hated that the fear still had hold over him. For a moment, a flash, Tony hated them all.

How much longer would he have to beat back the claws of his memories? How much longer would he breathe through a haze and blink away a darkness, lying through his teeth and in his blood? How much longer until he could trust his own mind?

How long?

“Everyone here?” Tony asked, tone utterly controlled as to not sound controlled at all.

“Think so,” Rhodey replied. “If not, well, it’s a sixteen hour flight.”

Rhodey’s words gave Tony a moment to remember why they were here, what their plan had been. He sought of Vision against the side table again, beginning to truly take in the scope of the lab around them for the first time. He wished he was in the mindset to truly marvel at the silvery, organized, downright  _ stunning  _ workshop he’d stumbled into.

The moment had been robbed from him. Somehow, that was almost the worst part. 

But he started across the room anyway, join Shuri and Vision and converging with Peter and his friends, Loki and Pepper and Rhodey. They formed a tight circle, tight enough that Tony had to lower his voice when he clapped his hands and said, “alright then. To work.”

On the next table over, Strange perched lightly on the edge of a chair. 

_ ‘Stark. What’s different?’ _

Tony knew the wizard wouldn’t join them, but he left a space in the circle anyway. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whoops.


	66. A Hummingbird's Breast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey look Pepper's back.
> 
> Hekkin' long chapter so that's why I'm late. 
> 
> Enjoy!!!

 

**_Earth-199999: July 3, 2024_ **

****

**** Pepper Stark knew what it felt like when the world fell away beneath your feet. She knew what it felt like when it was someone else’s, someone loved—and she knew what it felt like when it was your own. 

She knew what it felt like to have nowhere to go, nothing to save, nobody to run to. 

Peter ran to her, anyway. 

They collided in the center of the driveway, the tears already flowing, the words already dripping from terrified lips, the embrace already tighter than anything in the universe. Part of Pepper vowed never to break it. And the other part knew that was a promise she couldn’t keep.

“Pepper,” Peter coughed into her shoulder, “Pepper I didn’t know where else to turn, they’re at the apartment and I don’t know where Aunt May is and I can’t—they’re all looking for me but I’m not a murderer, I’m not, you have to believe me—”

“I believe you.” Pepper tangled her fingers in his sweaty, matted curls and held the boy closer. “It’s okay Peter, it’s going to be okay.”

A choking sob, a keening whine, and Peter was hugging her closer. Pepper held him just as tight, a hand on his head and on his spine. As though she could hold him together.

“I was just trying to set it right,” Peter whispered. “I was just—I trusted him, I thought he was a friend, I thought he would help me…  _ I needed him to help me.  _ I screwed it up, I screwed it all up—”  

If Beck wasn’t already dead, Pepper would have flown across universes to rip him limb from limb in that moment. 

“This isn’t your fault,” Pepper assured, pressing her cheek to Peter’s forehead. “In no way, in no world, will this ever be your fault.”

“What am I gonna do?” 

Peter’s voice was so quiet, so scared, so  _ young.  _ With too much a burden on his shoulders, far too heavy for him to carry alone. 

But no one else could. 

No one else could, because Pepper had Morgan to think about, had the company to think about, had the relief funds and the promises. Had the Accords. And Peter was so many people now, so many images to the world around her.

But she didn’t care. 

“You’ll stay,” she said. “I’ll fix this. It doesn’t matter how long it takes, how far I have to go. How many idiots I have to decapitate. I’ll fix this.” 

Peter stilled in her arms, stepping back to look at her after a moment. He was so tall. There was a quiet hope, a whisper of relief, that danced in his eyes for just a moment. But then there was only determination and exhaustion, and Peter shook his head.

“You can’t,” he sighed. “It’s alright.”

“I fucking will,” Pepper spat. She could feel the Rescue’s arc reactor against her chest. “You have a home, Peter, you—”

“And when they come knocking, asking after me? When they get suspicious of why you’re so adamant in the face of evidence? When they see the suits and the workshop and Morgan?” Peter shook his head, mouth drawn tight beneath red eyes. “I won’t do that to you.”

“You wouldn’t be doing anything to us, Peter. You’re welcome here.”

“By you,” Peter objected. “But it’s the whole world.”

“I don’t care,” Pepper growled, a hand coming up to grip Peter’s fingers on her shoulder. “I’ll take every two-faced self-guided media sucker that  _ dares  _ to knock on my door. All of them at once. I promise.”

The world didn’t get to lay another hand on her kids. 

In the house, Morgan laughed at something unseen. A chicken clucked, then another, and Pepper heard the coffee pot beep its warning completion. The poppies were finally blooming on the edge of the porch.

“I won’t put you in danger,” Peter whispered. “I won’t.”

“Peter.”

“I can’t.”

_ “Peter.”  _ Pepper’s voice caught, her hand tightening over the boy’s. Her eyes were stinging.

“I’m tired, Pepper,” Peter whispered. 

Pepper pulled him close, fingers carding through his hair. She hated that she knew what this helplessness felt like, hated that she knew the boy was right. 

“I know, sweetheart,” Pepper murmured. “I know.”

“MJ and I—MJ and I were going swinging… she didn’t like it but she came…” He drew a breath, and it shuddered through his throat. “She came anyway…” 

“I know.”

“Everyone knows.” Peter sunk against her, whatever determination had kept him upright enervating into nothingness. “Everyone knows, and nothing… it won’t ever be the same.”

Pepper couldn’t say anything. There was nothing else to speak of, nothing when any comfort she could give would be a lie at worst and temporary at best. So she stood there and let Peter soak up her strength for as long as he needed.

There was nothing to say. Nothing she could do.

Pepper had only ever known one person who could stand against the world and win.

A breath; two. Three. Pepper could feel it as Peter slowly pieced himself back together, assembling his composure one vertebrae at a time. 

Until he stiffened. Like a stag at the sound of a breaking branch. 

He moved just in time to catch the spear shaft as it whipped towards him. 

Pepper stumbled as Peter twisted away from her, a hand shoving her back and out of the way. Both of his hands came up, sliding over the familiar silvery beam of the weapon’s handle and just barely stopping its decent before the counterweight bashed him into unconsciousness.

Unathi gripped the spear with defensive determination. His stance crunched against the driveway as he moved a foot to brace himself against the spear and Peter’s strength. Gaze snapping to Pepper, Unathi’s grip tightened. 

“Pepper, baleka!” he roared, and  _ hauled.  _

Peter yelped as the spear suddenly ripped from his grip, the polished vibranium somehow  _ slipping  _ from his sticking hands. Dropping a hand down toward the blade, Unathi swung wide toward the boy. 

Peter ducked into a roll. His hands spread wide on the dirt of the driveway, and Pepper saw the glint of his web-shooters as they flicked down against his palms.

“What are you—”

Her words went unheard as Peter dived sideways again, and Unathi’s spear struck a stone with a vibrating tone. Spider-Man’s first shot went wide; the next, Unathi simply severed with the glinting blade of his spear.

“Dude!” Peter yelped, ducking again. 

They were moving—no, Unathi was pushing Peter back, strong and immovable against the boy’s lithe agility, a bear to Peter’s falcon. They circled, the whistle of air against a blade and the discharges of webbing catching in the air. Unathi forced Peter around, directed his retreat, until the Wakandan was standing between Peter and Pepper. He braced his spear sideways and snarled something in that popping, clicking language they didn’t understand.

Pepper’d had enough.

The Rescue’s gauntlet formed around her fist between one heartbeat and the next. She pointed it expertly, discharged it perfectly. A laser blast of white light knocked Unathi’s spear from his hands and vaporized Peter’s webbing as both swung toward connection. 

The two men froze.

“Calm your little butts,” Pepper snarled, not lowering her palm. She took a step forward, then another, locking eyes with Unathi as she walked past him. To Peter.

The mailman—could she even call him that now?—flinched forward, but Pepper charged the Rescue again in warning. Confusion was pungent in the air, from all of them, as Pepper carefully moved to stand beside her Spider-Man. Peter’s wrist was still extended; Pepper eased it down to the side.

“Don’t,” she said. “He’s a friend.”

She was speaking to both of them. Only one understood. 

Pepper turned back to Unathi, letting Rescue fold away into her sleeve. She pointed, slowly and obviously so there was no chance of being misinterpreted, toward the house. 

There was some explaining to do.

* * *

 

“This, as you’ve obviously gathered by this point, is Peter Parker.”

Peter waved ruefully, still on the edge of his seat, ready to leap into action at a moment’s notice. Or he would have been, if Morgan had not situated herself on his lap. “Hi.”

Unathi didn’t answer. His gaze sidled sideways to his spear—which Pepper had confiscated behind her chair.

“That’s Unathi,” Morgan continued for Pepper as FRIDAY began to translate. “He’s the mailman.”

“The mailman… with a spear?” Peter asked.

“Apparently,” Pepper sighed. 

Unathi spoke, urgent and cutting. FRIDAY relayed, “Unathi asks why your daughter is sitting on a world-criminal’s lap. He also asks what ‘said world-criminal’ is doing in your living room.”

“Peter hasn’t done anything wrong.” Pepper laced her fingers together, bracing them on her knees. “He’s been framed by the sequestering of advanced holographic Stark Tech and a group of imbeciles who decided Tony Stark owed them  _ anything at all.” _

They waited as FRIDAY did her best to translate, her code sparking as she attempted quick mediation. 

“Quentin Beck was nothing but a second-rate engineer with a grudge,” Pepper continued, trying to keep the hiss out of her voice. “He had no powers; it was all an illusion. Through EDITH, through the Stark drones, through work and programming and not a bit of honor. Peter was simply trying to enjoy a class trip. Then he was trying to save the world. Then he was trying to  _ show  _ the world.”

Another pause, to let FRIDAY catch up.

“Peter Parker is Spider-Man, yes,” Pepper said. “But he’s the hero of our story. He always has been—no tricks. No lies.” 

Unathi’s brows furrowed at the words, his hands twitching at his sides. He looked at Peter, at Morgan, and Pepper couldn’t read the multitude of expressions that slammed across his face.

“He says, ‘how do you know he isn’t tricking you, too?’” buzzed the phone between them.

Peter stayed silent, swallowing. His knees bounced and Morgan readjusted on top of them. 

 “Because he’s part of my family,” Pepper said simply. “And I trust him with my life, and more.” 

She trusted him with the company. With the sunglasses. With EDITH, with the world, with Tony’s legacy and with her own, sitting there on his lap in her pale blue sundress and her frizzy pigtails. There was nothing but truth between them—could be nothing else. Not since the Snap.

FRIDAY said, “he wants to know if he’s dangerous.”

“Peter?” Pepper smiled. “Oh yes. But not to me, and not to Morgan. Not to any innocent in this world; he’s our champion.”

Unathi nodded. Once, sharply. 

“‘Then I am sorry’, he says.” FRIDAY obligingly matched the tone. “He was fearful of your fate, knowing who you are, in the grasp of who he thought was a villain.”

Pepper huffed a half-hearted chuckle. “I appreciate it. Though I can take care of myself.”

Unathi raised a palm, mimicking the discharge of Pepper’s repulsor with a slanting grin. 

“He says he’s been made aware of that,” FRIDAY said, amusement in her automated voice.

“Does…” Peter raised a hand. “Does this mean we’re cool?”

Unathi hummed, and they could see him forming his words with slow precision. When he did speak, it was quick and easy and decisive, with no need to clarify.

“‘Pepper is the most competent person I know’,” FRIDAY relayed quietly. “‘I believe her, and by extension, I believe you, Peter Parker. Any family to her is family to me.’”

Pepper smiled.

“Thank  _ God,”  _ Peter breathed, dropping his head against Morgan’s shoulders. The girl giggled and pawed at face, redirecting it to the top of her head. “I was really worried I’d have to web a Wakandan.”

“Uzakuya phi?” Unathi inquired.

“‘Where will you go?’”

The smile melted away from Peter’s face, exhaustion creeping at its corners again. “I don’t know,” he sighed. “I can’t… I won’t stay here. I’ll just be a danger.”

He was looking at Pepper as he spoke, stopping her protests before they could begin. Morgan reached up, gripping his calloused fingers with her own small hands.

Unathi nodded once after FRIDAY’s voice faded away. He spoke hesitantly, after a moment.

“He’s offering,” the phone mused, “if you would like, to carry messages.”

Peter straightened. “What?”

“You likely won’t be able to call Pepper—she’ll be under careful watch for it, if the UN has any sense. But Unathi will… he’ll bring letters. If you direct them to the post office with no other address, he can get them here. Undocumented.”

Fragile, beautiful hope bloomed on Peter’s face. 

“Really?”

Unathi nodded, smiling back at the boy.

“‘Any family to Pepper is family to me.’”

 

**_July 20, 2024_ **

Pepper knew it would take time for Peter to write. Time for it to arrive, and time for him to find materials, a mailbox, stamps, as a wanted criminal. 

She still couldn’t quantify it, couldn’t believe it, as they turned the name of the kindest, most honest, most intelligent boy she knew into an attention grab, a horror story. Watching the news with Morgan was impossible, now, as the girl’s righteous rage rivaled Pepper’s. Pepper fended off her own inquirers. The sunglasses, the suit, the promises of Tony’s will—everything was suspected, if not confirmed to the public. 

She spent more time in New York, more time with the company. She wrote responses, dodged emails and phone calls, dropped clues to send authorities on wild goose chases to turn their attention away from SHIELD. She got into the news, giving people something else to focus on. 

And she spoke of the truth, over and over and over again. But even her credibility, thrown into question by her years disconnected from the industry, wasn’t enough to stop the search. 

She’d only been searched once. DUM-E had discouraged any others.

Peter’s first letter came weeks after she’d grown nervous, antsy, concerned. But come it did, as she waited by the mailbox like every morning, slipped into the back pocket of Unathi’s jacket. It was short and sweet and said nothing at all, and everything at once. 

Pepper came to wait the next day, too.

* * *

 

_ Hi Pepper, _

_I dunno if you got my last letter; the whole adress thing was kinda unconventional from the last place I mailed. I’m still alive, as of the second of September. Hooray!_ _  
_ _I’ve found someplace to stay. It could be worse—could be a lot worse. Comparatively, it’s downright cozy, and I’m thanking everything I can for all the help. You’ve done so much. I know you don’t feel like you have, but it’s true. Thank you._

_ Give Morgan my love. _

_ Peter. _

 

**_August 3, 2024_ **

__ “Anything?”

Unathi shook his head. He knew the question by this point, even without FRIDAY to translate. 

He presented her ceremoniously with another pile of notes and spam and contact requests, not straightening from the bow until Pepper took them. And promptly tossed them wearily onto the top of the mailbox. 

Unathi leaned against his bike, watching her in that way he always did. It was patient and curious and content all at once, as though he was awaiting something but perfectly satisfied to do so. 

The autumn sun had turned the trees, and a pair of sneakers had replaced Unathi’s sandals. Beneath his pant legs, Pepper could always see the ankles of his mismatched socks, patterned with bright colors and speckled with seemingly random icons. A light chestnut and gold scarf was always tucked around his neck to ward away the morning breezes of this significantly cooler climate. It matched his eyes. 

She hadn’t expected to meet him today—she was a bit later than usual—so she hadn’t brought FRIDAY. Somehow, she didn’t think she’d needed to, despite the silence that had fallen over them. It could have been awkward, if it had been between different people.

Bracing her elbow on the mailbox, Pepper’s hands busied themselves stacking the mail. Unathi was humming something, hands tapping a rhythm against the frame of his bicycle. 

That reminded her.

“I have something for you.” Pepper rifled in the pocket of her hoodie. “You don’t have nearly enough shwag.”

The pin was small and intricate, a rusty pyramid of gears and wire twisted around itself. A lifetime spent working with a mechanic gave Pepper a knowledge of pliers—how to use them if not what to do with them. The little bicycle was secure and cleanly assembled, made of steel and bronze, scraps of the workshop, of the Rescue. Pepper was unabashedly proud of it. 

Unathi’s eyes went wide, mouthing something surprised and awed. His hands ghosted over the pin in Pepper’s outstretched palm. Driftwood gaze snapped to her, and he pointed at himself. 

 “Yes, it’s for you!” Pepper laughed. “Now there’s something to tell my mailman apart from all the nonexistent others. You’re welcome.”

Unathi grinned somewhat shyly, scooping the pin into the crest of his palm. It glinted against his dark skin, almost the same color as his fingernails as he fiddled to open the back. He pinned it above his USPS badge. The wheels overlapped the embroidery slightly, like the little figurine was racing along the edge. 

He said something inarticulate, but Pepper didn’t need the words to understand the thanks, or the vocalization to know he liked it. 

She and Morgan opened the mail together that day. There was a new flower in the vase beside them, and Morgan got up to tuck it behind her ear.

 

**_August 18, 2024_ **

Pepper knew there was no mail on Sundays.

She waited by the box anyway. They both did. 

 

**_September 10, 2024_ **

“This only works the  _ front  _ wheel, see?” Morgan explained, squeezing the breaks on the left side of her handlebars. 

“I see,” Pepper said. “It’s the same on mine.” 

“There’s a little cord. And then the cord splits—no, it has a sheath and it comes out of the sheath.” Morgan’s mittened hands traveled down the frame of her bike, tracking the position of the cord. “And  _ then  _ it splits.”

“Mm,” Pepper hummed. “How do you think they have to manage the wires not being symmetrical?”

“It doesn’t matter if their symmetrical, as long as they have tension,” Morgan lectured. 

Pepper smiled. It was Morgan’s self-appointed civic duty to inform Pepper about all the workings of the world around them—regardless of how jejune. Everything was important to the girl. 

“Are you sure it’s not too small for you?” Pepper asked for the third time. They hadn’t ridden their bikes in a while, and Morgan had grown so much. “I can move the seat up.”

“It’s fine,” Morgan assured, straddling the ruby red frame. “See?”

“I see.” 

Morgan’s eyes traveled up the road, closely followed by an excited point. “There’s Unathi! There he is!”

Pepper turned, keeping a hand on the center of the handlebars, and lifting the other to wave to the approaching individual. Morgan shoved herself up onto her seat and pushed off toward the mailman, her little bell  _ dinging  _ in salutation. Grinning, Pepper watched the little bike circle Unathi’s trailer, coming up beside him. 

Unathi’s tires screeched as he halted beside her mailbox. “Hello.”

Hearing it for months on end in Pepper’s voice made the word familiar to him—and to her.

“Hello!” Pepper replied. “Fancy some company?”

Unathi understood not a word, grinning and stepping over the frame. He pushed down his kickstand and found today’s mail as Pepper found FRIDAY in her pocket. She repeated the question. 

“He says he’d love nothing more,” FRIDAY chirped, a smile in her voice. 

Unathi was smiling too, the cool air fogging around him as he breathed. The yarn of the hat Peter had awkwardly crocheted Pepper tickled her forehead, slipping down to her eyebrows. Frosty ground crunched beneath wheel tires, but none of them noticed the cold. 

* * *

 

She invited him in for cocoa when they got back. Morgan was excited enough for both of them combined, meshing a mittened hand with Unathi’s and practically dragging him into the lakehouse. Pepper had to jog to keep up. 

The kitchen opened onto the living room, a fact Pepper would be eternally grateful for. She could see the two sprawled on the carpet, playing show-and-tell with just about every object Morgan owned. FRIDAY listened from her installation in the ceiling. The highlight of the afternoon would have had to be the first time she spoke and sent Unathi leaping halfway across the continent in surprise. 

Pepper’s cooking skills were not gourmet, and neither were her cocoa making skills, but she could follow a recipe as well as the next cook. Staring at the chocolate mixture as it slowly assimilated its other ingredients, Pepper heard the clink of wooden toys from the other room. The Lincoln Logs—good. 

“These were made by the son of the great architect Frank Lloyed Wright,” Morgan proclaimed happily. “His name was John. So these aren’t toys, they’re  _ tools.  _ Architecture tools.”

Unathi hummed, and the clinking increased in volume as he began to dig through the toys. 

Morgan lapsed into silence. Pepper glanced over her shoulder, checking in, only to see the girl watching Unathi carefully sort the logs by size and shape. 

Sometime between then and when Pepper poured three mugs of hot chocolate, a sprawling compound had begun to assemble beneath Unathi’s fingers. Complete with catenary bridges and chimneys, Pepper figured she must have dropped out of time for a few hours. 

“That’s  _ amazing!”  _ she exclaimed, trying not to sound surprised. 

Unathi looked up, but not before he carefully knocked another log into position. 

“He says thanks,” FRIDAY explained. “He worked on building design when he lived in Wakanda.”

Pepper settled down next to the two, handing Morgan her mug and setting Unathi’s down by his elbow. “And now you deliver mail. Seems like a step down—no offense.”

Listening to FRIDAY’s translation, part of Pepper reminded her to thank the AI, while the other part was slightly less grateful to the symbol of the circumstantial wall between her and Unathi. But for now, FRIDAY was their only window through it. 

“He says you’re not wrong,” FRIDAY hummed, as though she knew precisely what Pepper was thinking. “But he doesn’t mind.”

She hadn’t known he’d been an architect. She didn’t even know why he’d moved to the States—not when Wakandans were usually so loyal and dedicated to their country and its culture. Unathi was a mystery wrapped in kindness and dedication, an unknown story inside a committed attitude and empathetic exterior. 

Pepper knew he was tenacious, optimistic, interesting. She knew he was intelligent in a myriad of ways, and curious in so many others. But she didn’t know why.

She rather wanted to. 

“Ask him why he came here,” Pepper said, settling down next to the Lincoln-log architecture. Morgan climbed into her lap, and Pepper held her mug out to the side to avoid spilling it all over the girl. 

Unathi considered the question for a long while, fingers playing over the toys. The longer the silence persisted, the more complex Pepper figured the story must be. The more personal.

Then there was a moment, like the flipping of a switch, where Unathi decided. She saw it—it was impossible not to. Their gazes were still locked. 

He spoke slowly, pacing his words so FRIDAY could pick them up with ease. “‘I came here to work as an outreach coordinator, a long time ago. A little bit over six years now. The actual outreach consisted of… about three days.’” Unathi laughed, embarrassed and rueful, and FRIDAY paused to let him do so. “‘Because three days after I got here… I realized I’d taken my sister’s spear. I’d swiped it accidentally when I got on the quinjet to come here.’” 

Pepper and Morgan waited, Morgan pulling her knees up to her chest.

“‘Three days, and I had her life-weapon, the one she forged, trained with, carved. The one that she knew like her very soul and made her formidable in battle. In my hands. Which left her without it.’” Unathi looked down, wrist knocking repeatedly against the little wooden palace before him.  _ Tap… tap… tap… _

“‘Three days, and Thanos came.’”

Pepper couldn’t stop her intake of breath. 

“‘My sister fought. With another weapon—equally sharp, but it would have felt wrong to her. Like trying to type on a new keyboard, but so much worse. Because you’re in mortal danger, but also because you made the old keyboard to fit your hands, and used it your whole life.’”

Pepper nodded, swallowing her interruption. 

“‘For five years, I heard nothing from Wakanda. Our middle-man, our contact, had been dusted. And they heard nothing from me. Because…’” 

_ Tap… _

“‘Because they found my sister’s body. K’Mana died on the battlefield with the wrong weapon in her hands.’”

_ Oh god.  _ Pepper’s hand crawled up to cover her mouth. 

“‘I moved up into the country. Got out of New York, away from everything. I left everything there; money, contacts, belongings. Everything but the spear. Got a job doing some small good for my world, for the people in their little residential houses who’d still smile when they got a holiday card. Who need to send gifts and love and relationship.’”

A bike and a trailer, to feel every inch of the world while he still lived in it. To find every thread of connection that he could.

Pepper knew how that emptiness felt.

“‘I’m saving, now, though. Money to get to Georgia. My niece transferred to work. She was dusted—came back more convicted than ever.’” He smiled. “‘I… I want to give the spear to her. It’s not mine to hoard anymore.’”

Pepper heard the unspoken end of that sentence.  _ ‘Not mine to blame myself for.’ _

“I think that’s a good thing to do,” Pepper murmured, gaze drifting down to the little wooden city.

“‘I hope so.’” Unathi shrugged, delayed after the translation. Then, quietly, “‘I’m sorry about your husband.’”

Pepper closed her eyes. “Yeah.”

They drank their cocoa in silence.

Before them, a city rose of wood and plastic and truths that hung like windchimes.

**_October 8, 2024_ **

_ Hi Pepper, _

_ I ran into someone today. Accidentally. I wasn’t technically supposed to be out, but I couldn’t stand the stuffy air any longer, and I needed to swing. Just for a second.  _

_ He didn’t try to kill me, so that’s good. He was actually really nice, though a bit uncomfortable. I think he felt sorry for me. That’s new; people either pitying or fearing me, a seventeen-year-old. _

_ EDITH is fine. I haven’t used her, but I have checked in every once in a while. Karen likes her, so that’s all we really need. I think FRIDAY scares EDITH, so you can tell her that. I dunno how far gossip spreads over the heart of the interweb. _

_ That’s all, I think! _

_ Peter _

 

**_November 19, 2024_ **

“I like Unathi,” Morgan proclaimed as they watched the trailer disappear beyond the crest of the hill.

Pepper tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat, feeling the sweaty cotton inside where she’d worn a hole through the fabric. “Me too.” 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yes this is how I'm solving the IronStrange problem. No you cannot change my mind. Yes I have thought everything through and will properly address emotions and backlash (at least I'll do my best). Yes I will edit the tags here in a second; I need to actually do my history homework... Whoops. 
> 
> ANYWAY Thanks for reading!!! I'm gonna stop talking now because when I get nervous I tend to over-explain stuff and here I go doing it again BYE!


	67. Delightful Display of Domestics

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have tried to post this three times now. Maybe this time's the trick! Enjoy!
> 
> Also fair warning I make up a lot of words in this chapter according to all those red squiggly lines that I don't want to change.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

Not so very long ago, Peter had stepped into a room where he could do anything. 

He still remembered that awe as if it had been just moments ago, flavored in the unique signature of Tony Stark and rusty with the distinct atmosphere of a home. This? The facility made of hexagons and smudgeless plastic, of honeycomb nests inside and on top of each other? This was a  _ universe  _ of possibilities, special in its own way.

Where Mr. Stark’s lab was grouped, Shuri’s workshop spread into a nexus of individual focuses. Where his lab was personal, hers was commercial. Where his was built on precise order to bend to his will, and his alone, hers was intuitive to anyone in the room. Where his was a canvas of electric ideas, hers was quite literally a work of art, etched with brightly colored designs on stark black backgrounds and swirling with engraved pillars, inlaid patterns, and undulating sculptures. 

It took half an hour to just take everything in, moving around the workspace as they sought the solution to their problem. Peter saw screens and immaterial keyboards, remote transition systems, holograms more lifelike and believable than most New York dumpsters. He saw nanotech crawling up the walls, swirling within the stairways and walkways and obeying subconscious commands. There were whole ingots of vibranium just waiting to be shaped. 

But the real show was in the people around Peter, flowing and spreading between stations as Stark and Shuri sent them scrambling to help. It was the hope on Vision’s face, the way he crossed his eyes to glance at the readings of Shuri’s scans as they popped up above him. It was the constant, high-pitched squealing from Ned as he passed his fingers over everything safe to touch. It was Ms. Potts and the Colonel, eyes wide as they took everything in. Loki looked reluctantly impressed. MJ’s satisfaction was oozing wonder. 

And of course, the real entertainment was Tony Stark, as enthusiastic as every one of them put together. He never hesitated to express confusion or understanding. Neither did he seem too proud for oogling, as there was quite a lot of  _ that  _ going around. 

That man… Peter didn’t know what to make of him. He was someone to look up to, someone to want to please, yes, but the longer Peter spent with him, the more he realized Stark was so much more and so much  _ different  _ than he’d believed. 

“Gimme that,” Stark ordered, holding out a hand to Shuri. Kimoyo beads changed hands without Shuri so much as glancing up from her own screen. 

As the two engineers began converting Shuri’s photon needles to a compatible data type, Peter wandered off toward Loki and the enormous arrangement of 3D nano printers he was lingering in front of. Not that Shuri and Stark’s work wasn’t interesting, but Peter had started getting in the way by that point. It was a two-person project. He didn’t mind; the others had grouped off long ago. 

Loki looked up at him as Peter situated himself aside the god, watching the nano printers deposit their shifting intricacies. He wanted to make a tiny dragon, but he doubted that was a responsible use of the tools. 

“What do you think?” Peter asked, gesturing to the room around them.

“I think,” Loki replied slowly, “that you humans are far too surprised when you witness magic for the first time when _ this  _ is what you can accomplish.”

“We’re an inconsistent bunch.” Peter bounced onto the balls of his feet. 

Loki huffed. “This is truth.”

There was silence for a moment, filled with nothing but Loki and Peter’s minds wandering individually. Peter glanced to MJ and Ned, speaking with Ms. Potts about something productive, in all likelihood. Rhodes had sat near where Vision was still lying horizontal, entertaining the android with words Peter could have heard if he’d put his attention on it. And Strange sat against one of the painted walls, so still he could have been one of the designs. 

“Tony Stark is a remarkable man,” Loki finally said.

Peter looked at him. “Oh?”

“My brother spoke of him sometimes.” Loki shrugged, fingers tapping against the table before them, jiggling the nanotech ever-so-slightly. It self corrected. “But all I knew of him first hand was from the little I interacted when I tried to kill him. Before, not this most recent time.”

“Loki…”

“I’m not going to shift on you, fear not,” the Asgardian sighed. “I am just voicing an observation. He does not seem to dislike me as much as would be expected, as he is still suffering from my actions.”

“Damage Control has done well,” Peter pointed out. “The aftermath of the Battle of New York was messy, but he managed.”

Loki looked over his shoulder, then quickly back down. “That is not what I refer to.”

Peter waited, not taking his eyes from Loki’s downcast profile. 

“Portals. I should have realized,” Loki continued. “After what happened with Strange in the Sanctum, it makes rather a lot of sense.”

“What does?”

“Your Stark has… I believe you Midgardians refer to it as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Peter straightened.

“Mr.  _ Stark?” _ He whirled, taking in the room again, the movements of the engineer, the  _ genius,  _ in all their fluidity. “No.”

“Can you really not see it?” Now it was Loki’s turn to look at him. 

“It’s not that, it’s…” Peter shook his head. “He’s… he can’t. He’s Iron Man, he’s the strong one, he’s not supposed…”

Iron Man was unstoppable, unphasable, untouchable. He was the one who did what needed to be done, who knew what was right, who came to save people where Peter let them fall. Iron Man overthrew tyranny. He transcended death. He was made of titanium-steel and nothing could slow that silver wit and golden power. 

He didn’t falter in rooms that were too small. He didn’t hesitate. He didn’t wake up from nightmares more often than dreams. He wasn’t supposed to _. _

“Do you perhaps think,” Loki said quietly, “that is why he doesn’t speak of it?”

Peter’s mouth flopped. “He’s the smartest—debatable now, I suppose—person in this room. He’d get help if he needed, wouldn’t he?”

Loki just looked at Peter, something cynical and ruefully amused in his expression. “Peter, everyone in this room needs help. Every one of us have shadows in our own mind darker than the ones that loom before us. And how many of us  _ get help if we need?” _

Peter didn’t answer.

Behind them, Stark’s laugh caught the edges of Peter’s perception, sounding satisfied and arrogant—but a shared arrogance, like a man whose partner had just scored high on a particularly difficult Decathlon event.

Maybe… maybe Tony Stark was just that. A man. A man with visions and logic and opinions, with desires, with fears. 

The boy settled back against the table behind him, watching as Stark craned over Shuri’s shoulder and spoke rapidly about something on the visible screen. Vision was on the other end of it, looking somewhat amused. Stark looked so animated, so unphasable—Peter felt like a miswritten computer program trying to equate the man with the flashing moment he’d been on his knees, scratching at his head like he was trying to free himself of his own mind. 

Peter wasn’t stupid; he knew true fright when he saw it. He knew what it felt like when something took over your perception, striping away your awareness and your reasoning, leaving you with only instinct. 

Stark’s instinct hadn’t been to run. It had been to fight. 

Peter always ran.

Across the room, the others were moving. Ms. Potts looked tired, looked like if she stopped moving for even a moment, she’d never start again. Colonel Rhodes was sitting down, his leg braces gleaming in the LED light. Vision’s own mind was betraying him, a matrix of danger ingrained into his very being. Far away, only here in the barest sense of the word, Strange had his eyes closed and his hands hidden behind his cape.

And Loki, beside Peter, ran in a different way. Ran from skin and into scales, ran from fur and into feathers. Ran to places none of them could follow. 

For the first time, Peter began to realize just how little he knew about these people. The team the universe had chosen to stitch it back together.

“Well, I wouldn’t call us a team,” Loki sighed. The whirring of the 3D printers curled beneath his words, a constant hum like the energy of a thunderstorm. “And I’m pretty sure the choice came down to Strange.”

Peter huffed a laugh, pushing away the questions. He told himself it was because there wasn’t time. He told himself he’d ask them later.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s go check on Ned.”

  
  


It was Strange who pointed it out, really. And Ned who started to yawn. Loki moved a bit sluggishly, no longer orbiting the room. Colonel Rhodes’s eyes had glazed over at some point, and Peter felt a heaviness in his limbs that he didn’t pay much attention to. 

For a room with an IQ far above any civilized habitation, there really was far too much dumbassery to go around.

“An inquiry,” Strange said, his voice shocking all of them out of their activities—he hadn’t spoken once since he’d quietly recited those words to Stark that Peter hadn’t heard. “When do you intend to return to New York?”

And suddenly, Peter remembered the other aspects of his life—ones that had him sitting bolt-upright in his chair. His patrolling. His homework that was due first period tomorrow. His  _ aunt.  _

“What time is it?” he demanded.

“Like four in the morning,” Shuri shrugged. “You getting tired?”

“Four in the—”

Peter’s squeaked exclamation was cut off by Strange. “That’s nine o’clock eastern time, don’t panic.”

But Peter was still panicking. “My aunt—Ned, were you supposed to be home? Did we leave—does Happy know—”

“Relax kid,” Stark said, halfway through the photon coding. “FRIDAY would have let Happy know where we went, and probably May as well. You’re ass is safe.”

Peter took a long breath, scrubbing his face with his hands. “Alright,” he said, “but if I get grounded its your fault.”

“Ha,  _ grounded,”  _ Shuri cooed. “Can’t relate. Gotta have parents for that.”

“I don’t.”

A pause.

“Oof.”

MJ snickered. “Who needs parents when you can have a complete lack of self-preservation and anarchy?”

“You,” Pepper answered, pointing somewhat aggressively in their directions. “You need parents, as teenagers not legally old enough to make logical, binding decisions, with brains resembling a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. That is to say, mush.”

Stark rolled his eyes to the heavens. 

“Are you implying that you make logical decisions?” Peter asked pointedly.

“Pepper’s probably the only one of us who  _ can  _ imply that,” Stark admitted. 

Rhodey made an offended noise, but Stark just raised his eyebrows at his friend. Peter tried not to snort as they seemed to argue telepathically for a few moments, the slightest change in expression triggering nonverbal understanding. 

“Not to interrupt this delightful display of domestics,” Strange spoke again, “but there’s an unusual ripple in the aura of the Swahili coast, and I do need to be leaving.” 

Immediately, the vast assortment of heroes and enhanced individuals were reaching toward the closest thing they had for weapons, fingers tightening on manifested knives, watches, web-shooters. Peter spared a brief thought to the usefulness of any of these weapons against a mystical threat. Not that it would make any difference. 

Strange, however shook his head, Cloak raising its corners in a placating sort of motion. “No, no, that was not a warning, nor was it an invitation.”

“If there’s something dangerous—” Stark began.

“I said something _unusual,_ not dangerous. Just a dispattern in the usual energy of that area. It’s probably someone trying to decode a mystic text or summon a demon with a bit more success than usual.”

Peter raised his hand. “People can summon demons successfully?”

Strange gave him a look. “Of course not. I stop them.”

“You can tell when—”

Strange cut the question off, striding into the center of the room as his fingers fiddled with that double-looped ring. “Enough, please. I’ll deliver you to New York, but the window of favor is closing in three minutes.”

“Alright, alright,” Rhodey huffed, sliding up from his chair. 

“We’re almost through this,” Shuri mumbled, sounding slightly disappointed. 

Stark glanced at her, adding, “it’d only take another forty minutes or so to finish arranging the lazers, then… six or so hours to edit out the Stone?”

“I’d give it five.”

“Got it.” Strange nodded. “Back for stragglers in eight hours.”

“Wait wait wait.” Ms. Potts pointed toward the billionaire now turning back to his project. “You’re staying?”

“That’s the plan,” Stark agreed. “You should go back.”

“Correction, I  _ have  _ to go back, or else the various company-running activities would fail to get done.” With a fond sigh, the woman strode over to linger next to Strange.

Peter might have imagined it, but for a moment, it seemed the sorcerer flinched away from the proximity.

“Kids, you’re on team New York,” Mr. Stark continued, swinging his finger around to indicate the three teenagers. “That includes Loki.”

The god huffed, but any protest or comeback he might have made was cut off by Rhodey as he too stood to join them. “I’ll just say if you’re not Tony or Vision, it’s time to go home.”

MJ didn’t move, however, even as the group around Strange grew. Well, beside Strange; the wizard had skirted to the outer left of their assembly.

“Technically,” she began, “you don’t have any authority to direct my decisions. Going back to New York in eight hours is certainly not out of the question.”

“Please,” Pepper sighed. “It’s too early—late?—for the ‘you can’t tell me what to do’ routine.”

But Peter was suddenly remembering the aggression, the  _ disgust  _ in his new friend’s voice when she spoke of the city and her home, her willingness to spend months on a political campaign just to get away. Maybe it wasn’t that MJ liked Wakanda—it was more that she hated New York. Maybe the arrogance in MJ’s stubborn sneer just now was more desperation. 

“Can she stay in the Compound?” Peter blurted before he could stop himself.

Everyone turned to him. 

Thinking fast, Peter reordered his words. “It’s late, and maybe Happy'd prefer not to drive into town and back again? I was just… if Ned and MJ could stay and then drive to school tomorrow morning?”

Stark shrugged. “I don’t see why not. There’s plenty of space, if you would like to do so.”

“Bunk. In the.  _ Avengers Compound,” _ Ned squealed in a harsh whisper that was practically a shout to Peter’s ears.

He didn’t respond, though, too focused on the way MJ’s gaze turned from surprise to confusion to analysis and then to an overwhelming, slumping sort of relief. Tension none of them had noticed fell away from her shoulders, and she stood. 

“If you insist.” Her voice was flippant, but Peter caught the thanks she shot his way in a wink.

“Your three minutes are up,” Strange observed. “Time to go.”

Without so much as a glance at anyone, he started moving—but not to form a portal or cast a spell. He simply walked, long strides taking him around the edge of the lab and out of sight. 

Peter and Ned shared a look and a shrug, and trotted after the sorcerer. The others followed in a long stream of chattering footsteps. If he listened hard enough, Peter could identify each individual’s gait, from the way Loki padded almost silently to the slight whirs of Rhodes’s hidden prosthetics.

Reaching Strange, they found him already stepping through a gateway, the sickly light leading directly back to where they’d left the Compound. His Cloak fluttered with his movements, shining in the light, and Peter was struck awed for a moment by the drama of the image. Someone should photograph the wizard—not least so unfortunate time-travelers could find him on the internet when looking up ‘Doctor Strange.’ 

Allowing himself a grin, Peter hopped over the threshold and back into his home. 

  
  
  
  
  



	68. You Know

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Two very important conversations.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_November 2016_ **

 

“Your family is quite… vivacious.”

Shuri’s observation was voiced some indeterminate amount of time after the lab snapped abruptly into silence and the atmosphere of the room returned to normal familiarity with the disappearance of magic. Despite the wait, Tony was still on edge when her voice broke the quiet. 

“Hm?” he said, tilting his head in her direction, though he didn’t look up from the project at hand. 

“I just said your family is rather vivacious,” Shuri repeated. She hadn’t looked up either.

Vision was humming quietly where he’d made himself comfortable on the lab table they’d chosen as surgery location. Not quite asleep, he seemed quite relaxed. His maroon skin stood out strikingly on the silvery background, and Tony felt his eyes migrate toward the Stone pulsing rhythmically in his forehead like a slow heartbeat. 

“Only member of my family still alive is me.” Tony frowned in concentration, squeezing another picometer’s difference in the angle of the particles before him.

“Really?” 

Tony did glance up this time, raising his eyebrows. “Why the surprise?”

A shrug on the princess’s part. “Most of you seem quite close.”

“I suppose. Rhodey and I have known each other since school days, and I’ve known Pep… fifteen, twenty years? Been a while.”

“And the boy?”

“Huh? Peter?”

“Yeah.”

Tony shrugged, biting the inside of his cheek. “He’s an intern. Protégé if I’m feeling generous. I provide the tech, he provides the hero work.”

And the excitement. The motivation. The youth and energy and positivity, the determination and the logic. The trust.

“Well, either way, you seem like good people to be thrown into kahoots with against my will.” Shuri’s words were half cut off by the sudden electric hum of her testing lasers, and Tony braced himself. He wasn’t wrong; the hum turned into an ear-splitting squeal as the particles clogged and skipped off their programmed lines, completely invisible but with enough energy to rattle the area around them.

“Thanks,” Tony said as they shut down the test once more. “I think.”

Another stretch of silence followed Tony’s words, time ticking by indeterminately. Tony wondered what had made them seem so friendly to Shuri. As far as he remembered, there’d been panic immediately followed by science; not much room for getting to know the members of their little party of curiosities. He couldn’t recall Shuri even  _ talking  _ to Peter, not before their back-and-forth before the latter returned to New York.

Well. They were all busy, and would continue to be. 

“Are you alright?”

The question surprised Tony again, though not enough for his careful maneuvering of particle circuit ejectors to be thrown off. “Alright? Of course,” he answered. He didn’t really think about the words, but he would have spoken them regardless. 

“I’m just… my brother was unsteady after his time on the astral plane, and I—”

“T’Challa can astral project?” That got Tony’s attention, and his head jerked up.

Shuri grinned, the weight of her hair sliding her head to the side. “Project? Not that I know of. But transport to an elevated energy level is necessary to ascend to the power of the Black Panther.”

“Really,” Tony hummed. “That’s interesting.”

“Before you ask, no, I don’t know what he saw there. But I do know it had after effects. He was one big kitten for a few hours.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s been a few hours. I’m fine.”

But even as he said it, Tony knew it wasn’t quite true. Admittedly, it was never true, but in regards to his jaunt across dimensions, Tony felt… shaken. Unnerved. As though his skin was still reaching ever-so-slightly back toward the world he’d seen and left. 

He could still feel future Strange’s desperate embrace. He was still confused by it. 

Perhaps he could return to that world eventually. It might be prudent to contact their future and try to work out what, exactly, they planned to avoid. What they might return to. He’d eat his cufflinks if Strange didn’t have  _ far  _ more information than he wasn’t currently supplying. 

Both versions. 

“Mr. Stark is quite unstoppable,” Vision murmured from beneath them. It was obvious the android was trying to move as little as possible. “He will recover.”

“Recover? There’s nothing to recover from,” Tony agreed. “A rubber-band, I am.”

Vision hummed. “Yes, a rubber-band.”

In the back of Tony’s mind, a silken voice wondered how close that band was to snapping. 

Shuri didn’t answer, flipping the power through her coiled laser base once more. The hum vibrated through Tony’s nerves, setting his teeth itching in his gums, and he separated them into a demonic sort of grin. 

The expression was justified, as the hum didn’t change in pitch this time, constant and easy as Shuri carefully adjusted the power flowing through the conductive vibranium casing. Slowly, the needles fuzzed into silent, precise dormance, ready for positioning and then surgery. Shuri looked up with a grin. Tony matched it and held up a hand—the sound of their palms connecting echoed like a thunderclap through the lab. 

“Successful?” Vision inquired, sounding hesitantly excited. 

“All systems are go!” Shuri agreed. “Let me find my transmitive coding apparatus—it’d work with the Kimoyo beads but it’ll be more comfortable for both of us.”

No response was expected, and Shuri darted away before she’d finished talking. Vision sat up on his elbows, watching her dart away behind one of the mural-covered pillars supporting the multi-tiered workshop. 

“A decidedly amazing individual,” Vision observed as she disappeared. 

Tony hummed his agreement. “We seem to be collecting a good number of those.”

“We do.”

Vision’s eyes were a bit unfocused when Tony looked at him, lost in thoughts of something else. Tony took a breath.

“Do you want to do this now?”

“What?” Vision’s gaze snapped up to Tony. 

The engineer gestured vaguely toward the android’s forehead, then around to indicate the tech crawling up the perimeters. “All this,” Tony clarified. “Do you want to wait?”

“Why would I?” Vision cocked his head. “You have the needles fully coded, the replacement reactor fully operational. The latter days ago. There is no reason to delay this development.”

Tony gave the android something that he hoped resembled a smile, if a bit rueful. 

“There’s you,” he said. “You’re all the reason.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We’re rewriting the entirety of your mind,” Tony explained quietly. “We’re rolling the dice on your soul. And we know the odds are in our favor, but we’re still fucking around with what makes  _ you  _ you, Vision. Do you want… is there something you would like to wait for, before we proceed?” A pause, a breath. “Is there someone you would like to wait for?”

Vision looked at him, golden eyes pulsing to the same rhythm of the gem in his forehead. There was something calculating there, shifting slowly and painfully to something resigned. The android looked away.

“You know,” he murmured. 

Tony perched on the table beside his friend. “Yes.”

“How long?”

Tony shrugged. “After the first few times, I got a hunch. The confirmation didn’t take long.”

Vision closed his eyes, breathing deep. Preparing himself. Misunderstanding.

“Vision,” Tony said quietly. “I’m not angry. I’m not anything  _ close  _ to angry; I never was.”

The android sat up, facing Tony, his hands fidgeting at his sides.  _ Fidgeting.  _

Already nervous, Tony was just compounding the tension. God, he should have said something a long time ago.

“It’s not wrong to be in love.” Tony met Vision’s eyes without hesitation. “No matter who, no matter when, no matter why. Not to sound cliche, but it really is the best thing that could ever happen to you—to anyone. Assuming it works out. Even not assuming—it’s gotta work out for at least a moment. A lot of work either way, but a solid investment.” Tony took a breath. “What I mean to say is I’m happy for you, Vis.”

“Are you?” Vision’s voice was even and cool. “You are so good at being strong, which makes you so good at those lies.” 

Tony couldn’t wince, not when that statement was truer than any reaction. 

But he could speak, could assure Vision with everything he could that  _ yes,  _ he was happy,  _ yes,  _ he meant his words. “I should have said something a long time ago. I should have been there when you were dreamy and wistful and wanting to speak, but I thought it would be better to let you approach me. That’s been my experience. Make your own decisions, let others make theirs. But I  _ am  _ happy, Vis, because you deserve to be. Happy, that is.”

“But you don’t approve,” Vision pressed.

Tony sighed, the heels of his palms digging at his eyes. “I’m happy for you,” he said again.

“That’s not an answer.”

“Would you believe me if I gave you a proper one?”

“Only if you spoke truth.”

“Forgiving  _ that _ little paradox, this isn’t about approval. I have a confusing array of memories of one Wanda Maximoff—” Vision started, just slightly, at the words— “but they have no bearing on what your feelings should be.”

“You don’t—”

“Approve? Maybe. Understand? No. Support? Absolutely.” Tony dropped his hands from his face, letting his emotions seep through into his expression. A glimpse of unfettered honesty, just for his friend.

Vision just nodded. And maybe, as he looked down at his hands, there was a whisper of relief, of a smile, on the android’s lips. 

“So, the question stands,” Tony said once more, his voice returning to flippancy. “Do you want to do this now?”

“I do,” Vision assured. “I spoke to Wanda when we first realized what must occur. I didn’t reveal our quest, nor our details, but I explained the Stone and its predicament.”

“And?”

“And she encouraged prompt action.”

Tony nodded. His fingers drummed a rhythm of eights on the table beside him, and his legs swung to the same tune. “If you want her here, with you, we can wait.”

“What would you tell Shuri?”

Ton raised his eyebrows, feigning offense. “Must I pull up my awards? I, Tony Stark, am the king of bullshit. I am shocked you would ever forget this.”

“You're certainly adept at spewing it,” an amused voice came from the closest pillar of the lab. “Not so sure about your ability to wield it.”

Tony turned; Shuri was striding back across the room, something sleek and rectangular curled around her wrist. With the curls of her braided hair and the bold designs of her clothes, she nearly blended into the swooping patterns painted on the wall behind her. 

“How long have you been standing there?” Tony asked, managing to make it sound nonchalant.

“Just got here,” Shuri answered. She skated back across the room, joining them by the table. 

“Onwards?” Tony inquired, his head cocked, his smirk growing. The question was directed at both of them.

“Onwards.”

 

Later, as the last hundred neurons were separating beneath Tony and Shuri’s deft direction, it was Shuri who opened the tense conversation. Neither of them really realized what they were saying, where their words were heading, too caught up in the work. Always the work.

“This is really rather comprehensive,” the princess said. “A matrix of neurons, all divided into a structure more efficient for the programmer than for a natural evolution.”

Tony hummed his agreement. “Indeed. The cortex was based in a biological seed, instructed to grow in somewhat the same organization as a human brain, but once the code was introduced things got a bit more binary.”

“Well, I’m thankful,” Shuri said, her heavily accented voice lilting a bit sarcastic. “Otherwise we’d be working with the loops and tangles and redundancies of a human brain, and I’m up for never having to try and sort through  _ that  _ again.”

“Oh? And you’ve reprogrammed a brain before?” Tony hoped she could hear the raise of his eyebrow in his voice, as neither looked up. 

Flashes of precise lasers lit up the bases of their fingers, each directed toward a defined, unique location around the perimeter of the Stone in Vision’s forehead. An alien object and a nuisance the Mind Stone might be, but it did allow an easy window into the functions of Vision’s brain. No cutting necessary. Which was good, for multiple reasons, one of which being that Tony would really rather not have to try and cut through his friend’s skull using diamond on diamond—or vibranium on vibranium.  

“Not the whole brain,” Shuri answered. Tony tuned back into her words. “I just had to edit out some trigger words.”

Tony’s fingers  _ almost  _ faltered. His expression  _ almost  _ flickered. His gaze  _ almost  _ darted over toward the princess at his side, the princess so suddenly reminding him where he was, what was truly happening.

“Oh?” Tony managed, voice even.

Nine heartbeats later, Shuri seemed to realize what she’d said. Her fingers did falter.

“Right,” she said rather sharply. “Uh.”

Tony said nothing, only working faster to pull apart and separate the cells and connections beneath his eye. They sparked and flashed, but severed easily, the Infinity-addled ones curling back toward the perimeter of the skull. The sheen of yellow was visible even on the holograms Tony interacted with. 

“You knew they were here.” Shuri’s voice was quiet.

Tony nodded. “I did.”

“You…”

Blandly, Tony pretended not to know what she was asking. He wanted to hear her say it, hear someone say it. “Yes?”

“You never told.”

“Can’t say I never thought about doing it, but no. Never told.”

Shuri still sounded hesitant, confused. Like she didn’t quite follow, and she didn’t quite want to. “But… they’re your enemies. By the very laws that ripped you apart, you’re bound to revealing where they are.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Tony said, managing to keep the snap out of his voice. “They aren’t my enemies. It would be so much easier if they were, but trying to convince myself that’s what all this is?” Tony’s fingers sped through the motions, pulling and reprogramming almost faster than he could think. “It would be a lie.”

Shuri was silent. This time, the lack of noise wasn’t innovative or companionable; it was cold and putrescent and corrosive. Tony felt it thick in his throat, felt it slide like blood from his nose and onto his lip.

“Are they here now?” he finally asked.

“No.”

Both sets of genius’s shoulders relaxed, relief edging their movements toward another level of efficiency. 

“They’ll be back in a month or so. By the new year, I believe, if Rogers doesn’t sniff out more trouble on the way.”

A fair timeline. Not looming too close, but with enough time for Tony to prepare, to decide resentment or reflection, avoidance or confrontation, truth or omissions. In a few months, they should be well on there way, not reliant on the actions of the Rogues. A spaceship might be beginning to find its design. The intricacies of their legal travel would hopefully be completed by that point, too. 

The sooner he didn’t have to rely on Strange, the better.

“I’ll have to talk to them eventually,” Tony sighed, keeping the tone light. “Or maybe I could just pretend they don’t exist until some world-ending problem rears its ugly head—oh wait.”

Shuri huffed a laugh that told Tony explicitly that she was  _ not  _ buying the act. “Uh-huh. Just as long as no one breaks any airports in  _ my  _ city, all’s well that ends well.”

“Fists will not fly,” Tony assured, crossing his heart dramatically. “Words? Well, no promises with those. Couldn’t catch them with a net.”

“Bad analogy.”

“Yeah, it didn’t do its job very well—only one of those, and it never even graduated—”

“Stark.”

Chuckling, Tony turned his attention back to Vision.  

Somewhere deep within the carefully constructed labyrinth of plans and procedures and schedules and dreams, Tony wondered how far away the man with the edited mind lay asleep. 

Or if he was even asleep at all. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for reading!


	69. A Hummingbird's Wings

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pepper's back again!!! Happy Halloween, also. :)
> 
> Please don't fight me, or each other, in the comments on this one. Thanks!

 

**Earth-199999: _December 25, 2024_**

 

Pepper knew what was in the box. 

May’d come upstate for the holiday, baring undeniably strange, slightly concerning cookie recipes and far too many gifts. Her eyes were red when she climbed out of the rental car. Neither of them mentioned it.

Neither of them mentioned it the entirety of the three days. But it was there on Christmas Eve when they sat around the tree and read  _ The Christmas Miracle of Johnathan Toomy  _ and  _ A Christmas Carol.  _ It was there in the morning when three girls ate chocolate chip pancakes and eggnog. It was there in the knock at the door, when a mailman on his day off brought an awkward, handmade card and a set of Legos wrapped in bright paper. It was there when they didn’t need the extension to play Settlers of Catan. 

It was there when they read Peter’s letters, again and again and again.

It was there, the emptiness. 

But the tree was lit and the snow fell in picturesque flurries, and what was Christmas for if not filling the emptiness, just a little bit?

 

**_January 21, 2025_ **

Pepper knew there were holes in Morgan’s gloves. But she couldn’t move fast enough to keep the girl from sliding into them and darting out the door, diving headfirst into the mounds of snow around the porch. It was slick and wet and new, absolutely perfect for construction; how could she keep Morgan inside?

How could she stay inside herself?

They built a fort, a path, and eight snowmen of various sizes and dispositions. One stood at the top of the driveway, beckoning to the mailbox beneath. 

Unathi left his bike along the side of the road. He was off for New Years with an empty trailer, and no one passed this way, so there was no reason to try and fight through the unplowed driveway. He carried his spear—not his, Pepper remembered—against his shoulder and left it propped beside the door. 

They still had three sleds, nestled against the wall of the garage. 

Pepper hesitated when she got the last one out.

 

**_February 14, 2025_ **

Pepper knew the date. She ignored it.

The vase on the kitchen table gained a sunset rose, an early spring bloom, perfect and verdant and native to this area.  

On the windowsill, a ruby-breasted hummingbird perched.

 

**_March 9, 2025_ **

Pepper knew she was good at cards.

She hadn’t known Unathi was ruthless. 

She owed him seven dollars—maybe more than that, now. Neither of them kept track. 

 

**_May 16, 2025_ **

 Pepper knew how difficult it must be to deliver to specific addresses when you couldn’t read English. As it turned out, numbers were exceptionally intuitive to Unathi. He worked off of memory and directory, the layout of the land, instead of words. 

“He does things differently,” Morgan observed. 

“Yup,” Pepper agreed. “So do you. That’s what makes you two so unique.”

They read Peter’s letter together that morning. Then Morgan climbed onto the roof, a book in her hand, while Pepper turned her attention to the garden. 

May was the best time to plant cabbages. 

 

**_August 20, 2025_ **

Pepper knew the best schools in the area. The acquisition of said knowledge was directly proportional to the months ticking by, through spring, and then summer, on toward August and the start of the school year. 

Morgan’s first school year.

Pepper made it through school selection (upstate, not in the city; they couldn’t drive that far) and enrollment. She made it through buying supplies—brand new pencils, crayons, a notebook, a lunchbox, a backpack emblazoned with the Avenger’s  _ A  _ in red and gold. She made it through orientation, or whatever they called introduction to the new Kindergarten teacher. She made it through the morning of the first day, packing her first sack lunch. 

And then she dropped an excited seven-year-old off at the bottom of the stairwell of growing up, got back in her car, closed the door, dropped her head onto the steering wheel, and sobbed.  

Because the passenger’s seat was empty.

Tony wasn’t sitting beside her. He hadn’t whispered a goodbye in Morgan’s ear, walked her to the door, taught her how to stand tall beneath the stares and whispers. He wasn’t smiling proudly beneath teary eyes as their little girl disappeared behind the door. He wasn’t talking overly quickly about the bureaucracy of the school system, or joking about teachers from the black lagoon. 

And when Pepper drove home, the house would be empty. 

So she didn’t drive home. She drove to the little post office on the edge of their upstate town. Her mind walked with her, purring with thoughts she couldn’t stop and regrets she couldn’t do anything to change, and Pepper felt loneliness pressing at the edges of her consciousness. 

They might have recognized her at the wobbly plastic desk of the station. Sometimes people could name Pepper, sometimes they could offer condolences. Sometimes they just squinted at her,  _ who is that, I feel like I know her.  _

None of them knew her, though. Not really. 

“I’m looking for one of your postmen.”

 

**_September 7, 2025_ **

“You would have liked the bricks, they have these little bricks, like puzzle-pieces and they fit together to make things,” Morgan explained excitedly, meshing her fingers together at the tips.

“‘Like those Lincoln Logs?’” FRIDAY buzzed in Unathi’s hand as he leaned forward, looking interested. 

“No, big and square.” Morgan drew her arms apart, fingers twitching as she tried to model the size.

“What were they made of?” Pepper tried to fish her napkin out from where it had fallen beneath the table. The conversation was fast-paced, and she attributed it to excitement.  

“Squishy. Like foam,” Morgan responded, tapping her fork on the edge of her plate. The movement inadvertently flung a bit of Unathi’s savory, creamy sauce across the room, and Pepper gave up trying to fight this battle before it started. Unathi shot her a glance, holding in a laugh.

“Did you build out of them?” Pepper asked, shoving Unathi with her elbow and turning back to Morgan. 

“Yeah. And then Kyle started hitting people with them, so I mounted a defense.”

“‘Good girl.’” FRIDAY spoke both for the smiling Unathi and for herself. 

“The teacher made us go to sleep after, but I was tired so that’s alright.” 

Pepper yawned. “You know who else is tired? Your mommy.”

Morgan cocked her head. “Is that why Unathi made dinner?”

“No, Unathi made dinner because Wakandan food is unfairly delicious,” Pepper said, gesturing to the decimated remains on her plate. “I didn’t even know it was  _ legal  _ to do that to a chicken breasts.”

Unathi chuckled. FRIDAY said,“‘There’s nothing a little coriander and ginger won’t make…’” FRIDAY paused. “This word does not translate, but I believe it means ‘gourmet’, ‘edible’, and perhaps ‘delicious.’”

“Thanks, FRIDAY,” Pepper said. “Say we definitely need to acquire more coriander, in that case.”

“What did you do today, Mommy?” Morgan asked after a moment, ripping off another chunk of her chicken.

“On this fine Friday? Well, I went to New York to check up on Industries yesterday, so today Unathi and I went biking. Then I played around in the garden while you finished up at school and he finished up in the post office.”

“I’m not allowed to play in the garden,” Morgan informed Unathi. “But Mommy is.”

Unathi spoke a heartbeat later, and FRIDAY translated; “‘That’s because you are in charge of the chickens.’”

 “Mommy plays with the chickens too,” Morgan pointed out, unsatisfied. 

“But only Mocha. The rest respond only to you.” Pepper wished that wasn’t as true as she said, but unfortunately it was; only Morgan could herd or direct any of the other five birds. It was a subject of much amusement on Unathi’s part. 

“Unathi says fresh chicken eggs are best to work with—it’s worth it,” FRIDAY contributed. Pepper was a bit surprised by her voice. 

“Do you have animals?” Morgan asked.

The conversation trickled on, circling aimlessly between Morgan’s day at school, Unathi’s stories of Wakanda, and Pepper’s indistinguishable sarcasm and genuinity. They picked the last of Unathi’s chicken clean, and washed dishes crowded together at the sink. Well, Pepper and Unathi did; Morgan stood on the counter and directed as much as she put anything away. 

And it was when Unathi was handing the FRIDAY-enabled phone back to her and slipping his feet into his sandals that Pepper realized.

The pace of the conversation. The speed of Unathi’s responses. 

“Wait!” Pepper called, leaving the phone against the shoe rack and sprinting out onto the porch. 

Unathi paused, his hand still wrapped around his spear. 

She’d left FRIDAY inside. 

“You… FRIDAY never translated into Xhosa,” Pepper said slowly. “Only out of it.”

Unathi smiled.

“You can understand us!” Pepper’s hands flew to her mouth, a grin cracking across her face. “Unathi, that’s amazing!”

“Thank you.”

The words were thick, slow, and heavily accented, but it didn’t matter. They were words, they were  _ his  _ words, his voice, and understanding them dropped Pepper’s heart into her stomach and then up into her soul. 

“Sorry I did not tell you before.” He spoke like Morgan wrote; each syllable brimming with effort and thought and concentration. 

“Sorry? Are you joking?” Pepper shook her head, arms waving excitedly. “I can speak to you now! You’ve been taking classes?”

Unathi nodded, hands sliding off his shoulders. He stepped forward, moving in front of her, and his shoulders raised slightly. She thought he might be blushing. 

“When? Why?” Pepper hooked a finger around his, still grinning. 

“I have been in class for months,” Unathi answered. “July, August. And I speak because, um, because I like your computer voice.”

Pepper cocked her head. “FRIDAY? Yeah, she’s quite the individual.”

“I do like her, this is no lie. But I did not… I did not want her here when I did this.”

There was a moment, right before he kissed her, when everything went oddly quiet. When Pepper could hear the lake lapping at the dock like it always did, so far away. When she could see the freckles on Unathi’s dark cheeks, the nervous catch of his lip on his teeth. When she could hear his heart beating. When she could taste the smokey air and the dry leaves upon it. 

Then she was tasting coriander and clay, coffee and caution. Unathi moved in a whisper, in a dance, so gentle she could almost imagine it was the wind against her lips, and not this man of dirt roads and metallic wonder. A rounded nose dimpled her cheek. Calloused hands curved around her jaw, down her neck.

Pepper’s heart stopped, and then restarted again, her breath releasing in a quiet  _ ‘oh’. Oh,  _ he tasted just as she had pretended not to imagine,  _ oh,  _ so that was how his vertebrae moved beneath her fingers,  _ oh,  _ so this was what it all meant,  _ oh,  _ so this… 

Calloused hands, calloused from the grip of bike handles, a spear shaft, instead of the wrench and drill and pliers. Vertebrae bending as he leaned down to kiss her, instead of reaching up.

Pepper hadn’t kissed anyone in three years. Almost to the day.

Pepper pulled away from the contact she hadn’t realized she’d been returning, so many things she hadn’t realized. She should have realized. Unathi chased her for a heartbeat, just one, before straightening back.

Pepper couldn’t meet his eyes. 

“What is wrong?” the quiet voice asked. Quiet, hesitant, and entirely new. 

“No.” There was nothing in Pepper’s voice. Nothing but flat, sharp deadpan. “Get out. I need—I need you to go.”

And then she ran.

* * *

 

Pepper Stark didn’t know anything anymore. 

But Morgan did. 

 

**_September 9, 2025_ **

The drop off line stretched a dozen cars through the parking lot that day, so Pepper pulled into a guest space to let Morgan out.

Hand in hand, they wove through the elementary school throng, attracting glances neither of them noticed anymore. At least they’d been here a few weeks and the whispers had lost their edge. 

Morgan slipped out of Pepper’s hand when they reached the stairway to the door. “I can walk the rest of the way.”

“You’re big,” Pepper agreed, stepping back.

Morgan looked her up and down with that child wisdom that Pepper felt wriggling beneath her skin, looking innocently upon everything beneath. That look only her daughter could give her. That look that Pepper couldn’t handle, not right now.

“What will you do today?” Morgan wondered.

“The company,” Pepper replied after too long a pause. 

Morgan nodded, turning to ascend the stairs without a farewell. 

But she did pause, right before the door closed, and look back at Pepper. She did catch the window on a pudgy hand and repeat Pepper’s own words, from oh so very long ago in the garage, with Peter at her side. 

“It’s okay to move on,” Morgan said. “He lives in you.”

* * *

 

Pepper had known. She just hadn’t believed.

“I’m looking for one of your postmen,” she told the woman at the desk. The one who crossed her route, her home, her mind.  _ Hers.  _

“Pepper?”

He was standing at the double doorway in the back, hands clasped tight around a still-sealed cardboard box. There was Amazon tape around the flaps. Surprise set those bronze eyes glinting, that excited hair spiking over around one ear. A bicycle pin, made of wire and gears, rode along the top of his USPS badge. 

A mailman from Wakanda, with bike and a trailer and a vibranium spear. Unathi the adventurer, the quiet, funny, kind traveler who cared just a little too much, a little to easily.

When had Pepper started caring?

A year and a half ago, Pepper had filled a hummingbird feeder out by the edge of the driveway.

“You’re different,” she said, words ringing in the silent office. “You’re different, and that scared me. Scares me. But I… different doesn’t mean worse. Different doesn’t mean better.”

Unathi didn’t move, didn’t blink. Over his heart, the wheels of the bicycle pin spun and spun and spun.

“It feels different, each time it happens.” Pepper took a step forward. “Sometimes it’s impossible, hilarious, sensational, and takes years and years of off and on, trial and error, push and shove to find the way your minds just match. And sometimes its slow, and you don’t even see it coming, lakewater and hummingbirds and cocoa and Lincoln Logs. It’s different each time. Love feels different each time. 

“But different isn’t wrong. Just because I loved the moonlight doesn’t mean I can’t love the shadows too.”

The sealed Amazon box found a rest on the floor. Pepper’s feet found their rhythm of steps. She’d finally found the rhythm moving forward. 

“You are hurting,” Unathi said quietly, and she was close enough to hear. “And it won’t ever stop. I know this emotion. And you have a life, a good one. I know this also. But I… I would like to be part of it.”

Pepper smiled, shaking her head. “You already are.”

 

**_November 11, 2025_ **

Pepper knew Peter would be taller when he came back. 

But she didn’t think he’d be  _ this  _ tall.

He towered above her a good inch as he crashed into her like every tide of the Atlantic, hugging as though to make up for all the missed ones in more than a year. But it didn’t stop her lifting him off his feet, spinning him around, didn’t stop Morgan from clamoring up him, didn’t stop May from crying and joining in, didn’t stop Unathi from wrapping his arms around all four of them. Nothing stopped the laughter, the shared heartbeat, the thumping pulse of joy because  _ Peter was back, Peter was back, Peter was home.  _

“I’m never letting you go again,” Pepper murmured into his sticky curls and smiled. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I agonized over this for hours today so please be nice? *anxious finger guns*


	70. Desktop Notifications

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *kicks down door* *screeches into trombone* *slams chapter on table* *yeets out through the nearest window* TIME FOR FLUFF

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Loki remembered the winter of the turn of his seventh decade, when the bay had frozen over all the way up into the mountain ridges and their unscalable cliffs. He’d forgotten his hat, but he had remembered his thick cotton socks with the swooping patterns his mother was so fond of. Thor had forgotten those too.

They weren’t supposed to, but they hadn’t asked—no one had told them no, not really. Ears pink from cold, noses running in the winter air, two half-grown princes had skated along the frozen bank. Loki had just begun experimenting with his telekinesis; being able to hide and move unseen as his present concealment allowed could only get him so far.

They both had their uses, of course. Loki had grinned at his brother’s back and snapped a branch in the woods far beside them. The  _ crack  _ echoed suspiciously within the silence. 

Loki had long since grown practiced at controlling his face, so it was with little effort that he’d kept in his laugh as Thor froze.

“Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?” Loki kept his voice as innocent as possible. No one except his brother would have bought the act. 

“Maybe it’s nothing,” Thor said, returning to his navigation of the riverbed. 

Loki had waited another minute or so as they crept closer to the river’s ten foot slope—the waterfall frozen into sickles of silver. Two princes ogled at it for a long moment. Loki remembered the way it had seemed to glow, like all the stars of Yggdrasil had been captured beneath its surface. He’d tried to count them, forgetting his little plot for a small sliver of eternity.

Then Thor had broken off one of the icicles with experimental hesitance. Loki had watched the other boy twirl with it, acting as though it was a great weapon, and snapped another stick. Closer, this time. 

Thor had whirled toward the noise almost quicker than Loki could drop his greenish haze. The prince held his icicle spear before him, sharp point glimmering. Skirting closer, Loki clutched the tall, dead grass at the edge of the bank to keep from slipping on the smooth ice and peered over Thor’s shoulder. He had to stand on the balls of his feet to see.

It took a bit more concentration to perfect the timing, but Loki managed to send a ripple through the woods. Thor’s pale blue eyes turned electric in the light, and Loki watched them follow the flora with deadly accuracy. Loki had snickered inwardly.

“Father said there were no game animals in the forest,” Thor whispered harshly, clearly expecting the forest to hear their voices. “Perhaps he was wrong.” He sounded excited.

“Perhaps,” Loki had replied, just as softly.

Moving back on the ice, Thor broke the icicle in half. He’d been practicing with dual weapons over the last month; Loki remembered him having been quite good with them by that point.

But Thor had handed the sharp end of the icicle to Loki. 

“Fear not,” his brother had said with his somewhat obtuse but stunningly sunny grin. “The bilgesnipes are long since hibernating.”

Which meant that of course, in the moment when his words were still echoing through the winter world, the bilgesnipe burst through the treeline and  _ hurled  _ itself directly at them. 

Thor thundered something intimidating and powerful—at least until his voice cracked in the middle of it. Loki remembered that part because it had finally broken his self control, and he’d barked a quick laugh before he could get it under control.

Caught off guard by the animal not balking in the slightest, Thor took a step back. Loki was ready for that too; the dusting of snow that gave traction on the ice was suddenly whisked away. A pinwheeling prince thumped onto the frozen surface with a bouncing  _ crack _ . He didn’t quite break the ice, but he went sliding down its length, pursued by a bilgesnipe who’s claws didn’t quite dig into the snow as they were supposed to. 

As he’d slipped over the edge of the waterfall, his eyes had found Loki’s. Loki’d given him a cheeky wave and vanished his illusion, giving Thor just enough time to look outraged before he’d disappeared. 

The ice had broken under his landing. Loki didn’t really remember what had happened next, but he did remember taking off his cotton socks and slipping them over his brother’s hands when they’d turned blue and stiff on the way back to the city. He remembered laughing, but couldn’t remember if there were two voices or one on that snowy Asgardian afternoon. He remembered their footprints in the thin coating of snow.

That was all they’d ever got; a few centimeters, in the coldest part of the mostly mild seasons. Never anything that came up past his ankles. 

This, on the other hand?

Loki felt like he was wading through a creekbed as the snow piled up almost to the middle of his shin. It was wet and heavy, clumping beneath his feet and half suspending him above the ground. He couldn’t even distinguish if he was still over the Compound’s concrete patio, or if he’d made his way out onto the grass. Awed, he slipped his fingers down beneath the surface, straightening up with a lump of snow piled in his flat palm. 

“Pretty great, huh?” Peter said from where he was perched atop the slanted stair railing. The boy was fighting with the laces of his boots, stuck tight to the banister, and his stockinged feet swung just a hair's breadth above the milky ground. 

“How can you possibly—” Loki lifted his own feet, clunkily contained in a borrowed pair of snow boots— “ _ maneuver  _ in these devices? It is nearly impossible to walk!”

“Not impossible. Just heavier,” Peter disagreed, shoving himself off the railing and landing with a puff of loose snowflakes. “It’s worth it to keep your feet warm.”

“They are ridiculous,” Loki huffed, narrowing his eyes at Peter’s bulging footwear.

Peter glanced at Loki’s own feet in return and grinned. “I mean, you’re not wrong.”

Loki hurled his handful of snow at the boy. It only made it a few feet, puffing into a flurry before it could reach halfway. Loki glowered.

“You’ll have better luck if you pack it,” Peter offered. “It’s good and sticky today; we could make anything we wanted!”

Experimentally, Loki picked up another glob of snow and pressed it together in cupped hands. The ice crystals crunched satisfyingly, and stuck to each other in a loose clump. Loki pressed again, and again, until he had something dense and spherical. 

He threw  _ that  _ at Peter. It went much better.

The boy dodged the snowball expertly, trotting up next to Loki and surveying the compound. His boots left little trails in the surface where Peter hadn’t quite lifted his toes high enough to avoid it.

“May the best snowman win,” Peter said with a wicked grin, and dove into the blizzard.

* * *

 

Stephen was tying a ruby-red scarf around his neck when Wong wandered out of the far hallway of the Sanctum, accompanied by the scent of stewing vegetables. Celery, maybe, or carrots. Stephen’s stomach rumbled. 

“Where are you going?” the librarian asked, disapproval and curiosity heavy across his face. Stephen wondered how long it had taken Wong to manage to mix every possible expression with disapproval. He was half-inclined to think the man wouldn’t be able to separate them at this point if he  _ wanted  _ to. 

Stephen tossed the long end of the scarf over his shoulder with a quick command to  _ stay,  _ and turned his attention to his gloves. The cold weather made his fingers stiff and painful, but no one looked twice at the gloves slipped carefully over his supporting bandages. Flexing his fingers against the worn insides, Stephen shrugged. 

“Out,” he said. “I’m hungry.”

“I’m cooking,” Wong observed wryly.

Stephen looked away. “I know.”

Though the raw ingredients held in the New York Sanctum were astonishingly lacking, this building was obviously the one with the best facilities—meaning, it had a microwave. And a half-teaspoon measuring cup. Using the food from other Sanctums and from Kamar-Taj, Wong had been trying to turn the perishables into something edible before they went to waste. He was doing a rather good job, Stephen had to admit, though he wasn’t too fond of the swarm of novices that would flock into his Sanctum at mealtimes.

There was always enough for Stephen, though. He appreciated that more than he probably should.

“It’s snowing, and you haven’t finished your sweep yet,” Wong observed. “Frivolous spending and—”

“You cooked yesterday,” Stephen cut him off. “And the day before. The day before that, too. All soup. With the same ingredients.”

“Hong Kong keeps a lot of frozen chicken,” Wong responded dryly. But the disapproval on his face softened just slightly.

Stephen set a hand on the doorknob, unwillingly trapped into waiting for Wong’s permission. The librarian had that effect on everyone. No student dared to so much as  _ edge  _ toward the door as class ended, waiting for the dismissal from Wong. Stephen was fairly sure it was magic, but one could never tell with the other sorcerer. 

“What’s the song of the day?” Wong asked after a moment.

Stephen’s reply was instantaneous. “‘One Headlight’, The Wallflowers, 1996.”

The lyrics were still floating in his head like stray autumn leaves. ‘ _ I’m so alone, and I feel just like somebody else. Man, I ain’t changed, but I know I ain’t the same.’ _

“Yesterday it was…?”

“‘Walk Like a Man’, Frankie Valley and the Four Seasons, 1963,” Stephen sighed. “Different, I know. Everything’s different. But it doesn’t matter, Wong; you know that.”

It should. But somehow, despite all the unique thoughts and faces and  _ things  _ that passed through Stephen’s perception each day, it was the similarities that mattered. The repeats. 

He couldn’t stand them. Reading the same book, drinking from the same cup, showering each day when he woke up… Stephen avoided any routine. He slept in different rooms each night. He performed his Sanctum duties in a different order, at a different hour, each time. He kept his bandages on and rewrapped in sporadic intervals. He bought exotic teas, coffee, tasteless and sugary beverages, even various vegan milks so he wouldn’t be drinking the same things each time he cycled through consciousness. He chose a different song every midnight and kept it in his head throughout the day.

All little things. All conscious, deliberate, humiliating attempts to remind himself that he wouldn’t look down at his wrists and see the green disks of Time. Proof that he  _ could  _ do these individual, separate things, that he wasn’t stuck against his will. Assurances. 

He didn’t really think he was looping. He never really  _ thought  _ it, but it didn’t matter what he thought. It only mattered what his subconscious had decided, what his broken mind had correlated to death and pain. 

Which extended to Wong’s cooking this afternoon, apparently. 

The librarian approached him with a sigh, reaching into nothingness to retrieve his own jacket. “Sandwiches?”

Stephen raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you have soup to watch?”

“It’s finished. If the others want it, they can come and get it.” Wong glowered, expression back to disapproval, in the direction of the kitchen. 

The edge of the scarf crawled back over Stephen’s shoulder, waving happily in Wong’s direction. Wong waved back, not looking away from the hallway. 

“Did you reinforce the wards?”

Stephen scoffed. “What do you take me for, a novice? I am the Master of this Sanctum, I’ll have you know.”

“As you are so fond of reminding me,” Wong rumbled.

“And I am getting desktop notifications from them, too.”

_ That  _ got him a confused glance. Stephen clarified, “I’ll feel it if anything breaks through the threshold. The Sanctum will be safe.”

“If you ever refer to a ward-connection as  _ ‘desktop notifications’  _ again, I will ban you from the library for four and a half days. Compounded each time you attempt to steal a tome behind my back.”

Stephen made an offended noise. “I’m the Master of the New York Sanctum! Future Sorcerer Supreme! You can’t  _ ban me  _ from the library.”

Wong paused. “Future Supreme?”

Stephen rolled his eyes, tightening his fingers on the door handle and yanking it open onto the snowy, early December street. “You and the other Masters are hardly subtle. I’ve heard your presidential debates. Though it is usually customary to consult the nominees  _ before  _ campaigning for them.”

“Hm.” Wong’s stoney face revealed nothing.

_ Fine then.  _ Stephen would just have to get his information somewhere else. 

“Sandwiches?” he asked, the tune of ‘One Headlight’ behind the words.

Wong nodded, leading Stephen out into Greenwich Village. “Sandwiches.”

* * *

 

Loki couldn’t feel his ears, nor his fingers, as he lay sprawled within the icy embrace of the still-falling snow. He’d been laying there long enough that it had begun to collect across his front, chilling his chin and neck and soaking through his trousers. Somewhere to his left, Peter was still talking, words muffled by the layers of snow between them.

“And decathlon’s going just fantastically with her in charge,” the boy was saying. Loki could see Peter’s hands waving in his peripheral vision—the boy was horizontal, the same as him. “You should’ve  _ seen  _ the way she ripped Flash a new one. Damn.”

“With words or magic?”

“Both! Not literally magic of course, but it might as well have been. MJ’s like Sherlock, practically superpowered with her observation. I wonder how she does it…”

Loki grinned at the overcast sky. “Have you tried asking her?”

 “You don’t just ask people about their superpowers, Loki. Plus I don’t think she wants to talk to me.”

Loki rolled his eyes, bringing cold, flushed hands up to rub at his face. Their pinkish color was dulled in they greytones of the air. “Peter, this is the same individual you involved into our plot to save the universe. The one that kept you alive on homecoming night, who knows Spider-Man is your identity. Who drew a picture of me.” He preened a little at the memory. “I do believe she wants to talk to you, else she wouldn’t be  _ doing it  _ so often.”

“Yeah, I suppose…” Peter huffed. “I just never know what to say when she asks me anything.”

Loki gave the pile of snow beside him a knowing look. “I’m sure.”

“I don’t understand it!”

“What a mystery this is,” Loki coughed. 

Peter either missed the oozing sarcasm or ignored it, responding only with a sigh. “At least saving the world has been going well.”

“Astonishingly so,” Loki agreed.

“Two out of six Stones isn’t  _ that  _ bad. Although Doctor Strange hasn’t actually  _ given  _ us the Time Stone yet…”

The doctor had been expertly evasive of any attempt to consolidate his Stone—of any attempt to so much as  _ mention  _ his Stone. He precisely avoided any context that might bring it up, rerouted conversations that referred to it, and flat-out refused questions on seeing it, locating it, or studying it. 

It was starting to drive Stark into conniptions. Which was the only reason Loki tolerated it. 

“I shall make him do so, at some point,” Loki assured. “When it becomes relevant.”

“Oh, I’d pay good money to see that,” Peter laughed. “I wonder if—”

He broke off with a yelp, and Loki was instantly upright. Peter did the same, his yelp continuing as he spat out a mouthful of packed snow. Loki saw it slipping down beneath the boy’s coat, and the yelp turned into a howl. 

Loki would have laughed, but just as he opened his mouth, a globe of snow shattered across his face as well, sending him stumbling backward. Then another, which he barely avoided—diving directly into the path of a third. 

“Ah!” Peter yelped. Lightning quick, he skirted out of the way of a second snowball aimed for him. 

Loki manifested his knives, bringing them together in front of him to stop another projectile as it approached him, directly toward his face. His leftover magic vaporized what was left of its powdery body.

But the snowballs kept coming, one after the other, at perfect speeds and painstakingly calculated angles. The assault was so precise it could have been computerized, either that or—

“Stark!” Loki barked, taking another mouthful of snow. 

Laughter bounced through the falling snow, cocky and satisfied and inviting. Peter followed the sound, pinpointing something Loki couldn’t see, and gave the direction of the driveway a vulgar gesture.

“Oh ho ho!” said the disembodied voice of Tony Stark. “I see how it is!”

This time, Loki saw a flash of movement through the snow, giving him enough warning to dive sideways. But it was Peter who took the hit, sprawling into the fresh powder with something between a screech and a laugh. 

The boy gathered the snow into his hands, pressing together his own snowball. 

“You want to go, old man?” he called, grinning wide.

“Oh, I intend to.” Each word was punctuated with another snowball, their connection with the snow leaving satisfying little avalanches.

Peter hurled his own snowball right back, with far too much strength then should be allowed. There was a yelp. Loki grinned, and Peter gave him a look—oh. Right. The knives.

Forcibly convincing himself to dissolve them, Loki dived for a far more  _ apt  _ weapon. Namely, the frozen fractals around them. 

And if there was a little magic keeping his aim true and his projectiles packed, well, who would know? 

  
  


 


	71. Architects of a Different Origin

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: I pretend to know how to do astrophysics. (I don't. I tried to learn but Khan Academy can only teach me so much XD)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

“Okay so if my integrals aren’t off, an acceleration of 100 gravitations-on-earth would get us to the Andromeda galaxy in about .3754 years. Unfortunately that would also take more than 6.7 times 10 to the 18th kilograms of fuel to achieve,” Peter sighed, dropping his head onto the enormous pad of scratch paper before him.

On the other side of the table, Shuri made a sympathetic noise. “Space travel is a bitch.”

Stark clicked his tongue—in agreement or thought, Peter couldn’t tell. He shoved off from one of the labs in the table, spinning across the tile floor to peer over Peter’s paper.  

They were holed up in Stark’s lab, as it was purely conceptual work today—or at least, that was the plan. Stark still avoided portaling as much as he could, but he was slowly getting less averse to others doing it. Not that any of the mental process had been voiced, of course, but Peter was paying attention. He cared, and he paid attention. 

He didn’t ask, though. He knew he should. Loki definitely thought so, and the Asgardian was not at all subtle in making Peter aware of that. Hypocrites, both brothers—trying to pretend they’d talk truth and trust each other, but dodging any mention of what was churning in the blackness between their ribs. 

Oh, how easy it was to just ignore it. Peter wasn’t the only one pretending nothing was wrong. 

“Did you factor in time dilation?” Stark inquired, tapping at Peter’s initial equation.

Peter stared at him.

Stark raised an eyebrow, and his tapping increased in speed. “Time dilation. Light-speed travel means that many years for the travelers…”

“The relativity equation—fuck!” Peter growled, yanking his pencil out from behind his ear.

“Language,” Stark chuckled. He spun back across the room to his own chair. 

“It’s travel time divided by the Lorentz factor,” Shuri supplied. 

“Right,” Peter hummed, scratching away at the initial equation he’d set up—completely wrong, as they now revealed. 

“Okay, so  _ that’s  _ not gonna work,” Stark said after a moment of watching Peter’s work. “Even if my mental math is off, the time observed by a stationary location—say, Earth—would be about two and a half  _ million  _ years.”

Peter’s TI-84 Plus confirmed that the engineer’s calculations were indeed correct—and horribly depressing. Peter let his pencil drop and rubbed his brow with the heels of his palms, groaning. Traveling faster than the speed of light threw all sorts of wrenches into the differential equations Peter was used to—specifically, infinite masses. According to Einstein, the closer you got to the speed of light, the more exponential mass you collected, and thus the more acceleration was required to move you. 

Fucking Einstein. 

“Congratulations, we have now confirmed decades and decades of scientific conclusion. Humans don’t have the capability to travel at, or faster than, the speed of light.” Shuri made half-hearted jazz hands, which dampened the mood far more than they spiced it. 

“There has to be something,” Peter huffed. “The aliens can’t be getting this from nothing, can they?” 

Shuri gave Stark a pointed look. “Someone has access to said aliens, last I checked.”

“Their tech, not the aliens themselves.”

“Gasp! Technology! Sounds like  _ exactly  _ what we need!” 

Peter’s eyes watered with the effort of keeping in his laugh.

Stark flipped them both off and spun twice around in his chair, locking eyes with Peter both times. Peter’s silent laughter turned into not-so-silent choking.

“It’s not that simple,” the engineer sighed. “I’m the joint owner of the Damage Control department with the federal government, meaning I’m the financier. I am technically licensed to review recovered materials at any time, but I have to let Washington know and get their acknowledgement. Which I’ve done. But it’s the US government; they aren’t about to do anything lightly, especially now.”

“But if you could get in, messing around with the tech wouldn’t get you in trouble?” Peter clarified. 

“Bingo.” Stark threw him a set of finger-guns. “But hacking into the door to figure out the code—which I am not licensed to know without ‘acknowledgement’—would.”

“Wizard,” Shuri said flatly.

Stark opened his mouth, then closed it again. 

“Fair.”

“We could bring it back here. The tech and stuff,” Peter supplied. “Do the observation in the lab.”

The unspoken  _ you wouldn’t have to use the portal  _ lingered heavy in the air. 

“Sounds like a plan,” Stark replied flippantly. “We could keep it here, after. There’s already containment set up—we could store it with the Gem and the List.”

They’d elected to keep the Gem contained safely within one of Tony’s radiation-proof safes, which he usually used for unstable mistakes and dangerous materials. The Gem was both. The Mind Stone, removed from Vision weeks ago, was kept in Wakanda, heeding the caution of Doctor Strange and keeping the energy signatures from compounding over time. 

Glancing up, Stark prompted, “FRIDAY?”

“Doctor Strange remains in the Compound.” FRIDAY sounded slightly intrigued by this. “He hasn’t left since he portaled Princess Shuri.”

“You don’t need to call me that,” Shuri said at the same moment Peter frowned and exclaimed, “but that was over four hours ago!”

“What’s he been doing all that time?” Stark wondered. 

“He seems to be sleeping, boss.”

The three of them exchanged a glance. 

“Okay then.” Stark huffed. “Wake him up?”

“I’ve tried. He’s quite unconscious—I believe his rest here was not intentional.” FRIDAY flashed the lab’s lights. 

Stark rolled his eyes, bouncing up to his feet. “Great. Another too-powerful individual with a fucked sleeping routine. Let’s go.”

“Uh,” Peter said, drawn to his feet against his will but hesitant to continue forward. “Is it really such a good idea to disturb the sorcerer?”

“What, is he gonna curse us or something?” Shuri chuckled. 

“No, I just—”

“I know what you mean, kid,” Stark interrupted. “But I’d bet my best tie that Merlin would be more irritated if we  _ didn’t  _ wake him up, far more than if we did.”

“Alright,” Peter agreed.

* * *

They advanced up and through the Compound together in relative quiet, though Peter rambled quietly and interestingly about the method of integration by parts. Tony half-listened, half fact-checked, listening to his feet tapping on the floor beneath them. 

Shuri was unusually quiet as they moved. Tony glanced at her a few times, watching her gaze skate around the hallways and rooms, and realized it was her first time seeing the building outside of the lab. Frowning slightly with a specific emotion Tony couldn’t place, Shuri took in the area: the wide windows, sleek flooring, sparse and elegant furnishings. 

“Like what you see?” Tony wondered.

Shuri looked slightly dismayed. “It’s so…  _ drab,”  _ she murmured. “How can you stand it?”

Tony opened his mouth to say something with mock offense to cover his confusion, but was struck with the memory of the lab in Wakanda. With its bold colorings and swirling designs, the place had been colorful and crowded and busy. He realized how different this must seem. In comparison, yes, he supposed it was drab. 

“Architects of different origin,” Tony said by way of reply, and led them into the lounge FRIDAY had directed him to. 

Having walked in on the unconscious bodies of a great many people in his lifetime, Tony was perfectly aware of the sleeping personalities that most people seemed to have. Each had their own position or expression or ease at startling, and Tony had stopped really noticing it a long time ago. But they weren’t usually drastic shifts of stature like the unconscious form of Strange the three of them nearly overlooked. It didn’t resemble the wizard they were used to in the slightest. 

The man was curled tight against into the far left of the sofa, almost burrowing between the cushion and the arm. His knees were tucked to his chest, and his cheek rested on one of them. Dark hair fell messily over Strange’s face, curling around his ear and frizzing slightly with sweat. The Cloak had swept carefully over his knees and hands. It seemed to support them as they continued to shake. 

Strange looked small. Small and tired and far younger than Tony remembered—not that he’d ever seemed old, but rather ageless. Like his life had been as infinite as his power. Now, though, he looked human. 

Tony didn’t want to admit how much that threw him off.  

“Oh,” Peter said, voicing something that Tony couldn’t place. 

The word was loud in the silent room—loud enough to have Strange bolting upright, breathing speeding to something almost fearful before quickly finding its rhythm again. Unfocused eyes found them, and blinked.

“Hi,” Tony said, waving awkwardly. “Sorry to disturb you.” 

He found that really was true. 

“Stark,” the wizard observed. “Shuri, Peter.” He lifted shaking hands to his face, rubbed at his eyes, and dropped them out of sight again. 

He seemed to take in the area around him, then his position, and straightened quickly. The control Tony was used to uselessly knocking against snapped back down—the mask of deceit Tony didn’t trust. Any guilt at waking the man Tony might have felt disappeared under a new wave of determination—they had a universe to set right.

“My apologies,” Strange said, standing from the sofa. He swayed slightly. Eyes focusing on Shuri, he asked, “is it time for you to return?”

“To Wakanda? No.” Shuri shook her head.

“But we would like to utilize your intergalactic Uber service, if you please.” Tony offered his most flat, unimpressed smile.

The sorcerer rolled multicolored eyes and sighed. “One of these days, you aren’t going to be able to afford the fee.”

“Billionaire.”

Strange raised an eyebrow. “Who said I’d be requesting money?”

Before Tony could reply, the wizard was striding across the room to stand before them, hand slipping into what they’d learned was called his sling-ring. “To where are you so keen to go?” he asked, managing to make it sound like an insult. 

“The Damage Control vault,” Peter provided. Which was probably smart, given that Tony was three words from turning this into a full-on battle of snark.

Strange’s eyebrow quirked higher. “The what?”

“The Damage Control vault. Where my joint industry stores recovered Chitauri tech from the Battle of New York, and other paraphernalia from our messes going forward,” Tony explained.

“Is this illegal?”

“No, in fact, it is not,” Tony huffed. “We’re just speeding up the process.”

“Sure you need me for that?”

“Shut up and do the sparky thing.”

“Fine, fine.” Strange raised his hands in surrender before they dropped out of sight again. “Photo?”

Now it was Tony’s turn to raise an eyebrow. “What?”  
“I need a way to quantify the energies,” Strange explained. “If I haven’t been to a place, or seen it, or know intimately how it feels or smells, I can’t portal there. It’s like trying to drive to a distant city without a map or compass or a satellite-paired, multipurpose artificial intelligence.”

“How about the sun?” Tony crossed his arms.

“You can’t drive from here to the Coldstone in Times Square just on the navigation provided by the sun.”

“You underestimate my love of ice-cream.”

“I thought you swore off dairy?”

“But then—”

“Ben and Jerries named a flavor after you,” Strange finished with a sigh. 

A pause, for a moment, as Tony narrowed his eyes. Something was off—he didn’t remember…

“My dietary health choices are not public knowledge,” he finally observed.

“It’s—that’s right, they’re not.” Strange ran a hand through his hair, smoothing it back into something that at least resemble order. 

“So you dreamed that little nuance.”

“I suppose,” the sorcerer confirmed. 

A whisper of the same voice, but from another time, drifted up from Tony’s memory. 

_ ‘Did I know you?’  _

_ ‘No, not really.’ _

“What do you remember?” he blurted.

Strange paused. 

“What?” Peter asked, glancing between them.

“Of the other timeline.” Tony waved an expansive hand. “What do you remember?”

“I remember most of the dreams I’ve had,” Strange said slowly. “But the events inside them… I don’t think they happen in order. I couldn’t tell you what happened there.”

_ You couldn’t. But future you might just. _

“Hm.” Tony glanced at Peter, who shrugged. 

Peter, who was helping them make a spaceship, who was sleeping in the Avengers Compound, who was fifteen years old. Who he wouldn’t be able to keep here, safe, on Earth.

Tony swallowed and turned back to Strange. 

“Damage Control photo, coming right up.”

FRIDAY provided the clearest she could find; a wide shot of the door that hopefully would be accurate to the current layout of the vault. Strange’s gaze flickered across it, then he moved across the room to give them space. 

It was almost surgically enough time for Tony to compose himself, to prepare and hold his head and shoulders up. They’d done this so many times—despite his best efforts—and it wasn’t so difficult this time. He still flinched when the portal opened, but he didn’t shudder.

Peter and Shuri all but tumbled forward, the pull of alien potential like the winding of a fishing line. Tony watched them with what could have been a grin, and followed more slowly. He focused on them instead of the russet gleam of the portal. It let him grow close.

“Woah,” Shuri breathed as she stepped through, voice echoing in the vast, cacophonous room. Which was suddenly  _ right there in Tony’s living room— _

“Mr. Stark,” Peter said, and Tony opened eyes he hadn’t realized had snapped closed. 

“Yeah, kid?”

There was a pause, as if Peter was searching for something to say. “Um, what do you want us to find?”

“The engine and vehicle parts should be over in 7B,” Tony replied. “Don’t get into too much trouble.”

The kid saluted, eyes flashing with excitement. There was the grounding of understanding there, though, and Tony suddenly wished for his sunglasses. Something to shield him, another barrier between him and that knowing look.

Then Peter was gone, leaping through the portal and following Shuri with inhumanly quick movements. Tony hoped they found the catch to opening the crates.

Strange peered through the portal curiously, and Tony half expected him to follow after the children. He stepped back after a moment. 

The light of the portal bathed his face in unhealthy shadow—it really wasn’t a very flattering aesthetic for magic, if Tony was being honest. In his experience—too much experience—magic had the intense, bold tones of jewels. Strange’s magic was impressive in its power, but visually? The awkward, sickly brown hues were unsettling at best and downright ugly at worst.

It seemed wrong, somehow. Something was tickling at Tony’s memory again…

“Got the short end of the stick on the magic look,” Tony observed. “Is all your sorcerer magic like this?”

Strange sighed. “Unfortunately yes. But it wasn’t always.”

Tony waited, gesturing for the man to continue.

“It’s a reflection of the misplacement of this universe,” Strange explained. “Our dimension doesn’t belong where it is; it belongs with the… the Stalk.”

Tony grinned.

“Shut up. I’m just using it because it’s easier to say than ‘mother dimension’.”

“Which is exactly why I came up with it.”

Strange elected to return to relevant conversation, which Tony considered a point in his favor. He smirked. 

“Before Loki arrived, the Mystic Arts manifested itself as a bright, soft orange—almost gold,” the sorcerer said. “It sparked the same—looked like fire shaped into a blade.”

“Sounds pretty.”

“It was, if I do say so myself.”

Tony looked back at the portal, squinting at the muddy colors. “You should keep it this way. Truth in advertising, and all that.”

He felt, rather than saw, Strange straighten beside him. Felt, rather than saw the mask sliding tighter over the sorcerer’s features. Felt, rather than saw the little bit of genuinity that he hadn’t noticed slip into the conversation whisk away. 

“Why do you hate magic?” Strange asked. “Why does it have to be evil?”

Tony narrowed his eyes. “Ask that to the witches and Asgardians and aliens that used it to try and kill me, control me, or otherwise turn my mind against itself.”  
"You can't attribute the entire character of magic to a few—"

"I'm going to stop you right there," Tony hissed, holding up a hand. "Tell me,  _ Doctor Strange,  _ have you ever been forced into something against your will? Have you ever felt an alien touch linger in your mind, someone  _ else's _ thoughts in the only thing you thought was safe? Do you know what that feels like? What it is to be  _ violated  _ time and again, gateways worming trauma-induced visions into your brain, nightmare scenarios forcibly implanted to stew within your mind and turn you into the monster of your own story?"

Strange was silent.

Tony nodded sharply, his smile putrid. "That's what I thought. I don't care about what your precious magic can do. I care about what's already been done."

Being unable to storm out of the room had the words packing significantly less punch than Tony would have liked. But the doctor was obligingly quiet, giving Tony the last word as the silence that they both refused to acknowledge gathered awkward strength. 

Looking back at the portal, Tony hoped the kids wouldn’t be too much longer. And despite his words, as he watched the feverish rust-colored power, he imagined what it might look like gold. 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stephen is small when he is asleep and no one can convince me otherwise. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	72. Bring the Light Back

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now (one of) the moment(s) you've been waiting for....
> 
> :D

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

The melting slush seeped into the seams of Peter’s boots as he stepped out onto the patio of the Compound, a long inhale drawing the scent of pine and damp earth. The day was bright, the temperature above forty, and Peter refused to stay inside another minute. This was probably one of the last chances he would get. In the deeper weeks of December, they weren’t likely to get anything over freezing. 

The sharp air felt good, clearing Peter’s mind. He’d slept in a little after their excursion to Damage Control the evening before, but it hadn’t been restful. Peter wasn’t sure if they’d been dreams of the Stalk dimension that had plagued his night, or dreams of his own—he couldn’t remember anything but screams and guilt and dark. Pressure, containment, dust. And a voice, young and scared, old and wise, with no associated identity, pleading. 

_ Help me! _

Peter shook his head, taking a deep breath. He leapt onto the top of the patio railing, his feet sticking and his inhuman balance keeping him upright, and trotted along the little spokes. His fingers curled around the delicate zipper of his wallet. The pattern was pressed into his skin, and he tried to remember exactly how many sandwiches he’d bought since his last acquisition of a random twenty dollar bill. He thought he still had a five, maybe a few coins.

“I don’t have enough money for chicken nuggets,” Peter whined. No one was around to be confused, so he was allowed to chuckle at his own execrable reference and step off the edge of the railing to stick sideways to its edge. 

Not really wanting to bother May or Happy, Peter rifled his phone out of his pocket. There was perfect signal everywhere in the Compound, and lightning-quick WiFi everywhere else, so Google Maps loaded in the blink of an eye. 

“Nice,” Peter murmured, walking sideways along the railing. His hair dangled down over his ear. 

Five seconds later, he knew precisely every location he could buy an ice-cream cone within fifteen walking minutes of the Compound. Was it winter? Yes. Did he care? Not at all. He avoided Dairy Queen—the place made his spidey-sense jittery—and zeroed in on a Coldstone off the highway not far away. 

Reaching the edge of the railing, Peter hopped over onto the grass, gravity flipping yet again. He steadied himself in a single step, sent a quick update to his aunt, and started off toward the road. 

It took a dozen steps for another voice to break the cold, still air.

“Hey, kid. Where are you off to?”

Peter paused, glancing over his shoulder with a grin. Against the same railing Peter had been fiddling with, Mr. Stark stood with a gloved hand wrapped around the spokes. He wore a slate-grey hoodie with a trapezoidal hole cut through the first layer of fabric, gapping to show the fuzzy black lining the the garment. His sunglasses reflected the sunlight, and Peter blinked.

“Hey, Mr. Stark,” he said, moving a few paces back toward the Compound. “I was just off for a bit of fresh air.”

The man hummed, and his chin lifted as he glanced skyward. “It’s sure a nice day for the dead of winter.”

“Agreed. Good enough for ice-cream, I’d wager.”

Stark snorted. “There’s no conditions for ice-cream. No day doesn’t match sugar criteria.”

“But some are better than others.”

“Undoubtedly.” Stark’s fingers drummed against the railing. 

“What brings you out here?” Peter asked, a bit awkwardly. It was Stark’s Compound; he had every right to be anywhere at anytime. 

“Checking on you,” the man replied. He tapped the edges of his sunglasses. “FRIDAY let me know you’d left. Not to be overbearing or anything,” he added a bit hurriedly. “It’s just the wizard shows up randomly and I like to know who’s likely to dematerialize from my surroundings at any given time.”

“Oh, no, it’s good,” Peter said. “A little bit of caution makes sense.”

Especially for Stark. Especially in regards to magic. 

_ Ask him now,  _ hissed a voice in Peter’s head. It sounded like Loki.  _ Ask him about the portals, about the magic. Ask him about dreams.  _

Screams and dust and captivity, pain and guilt and death and blood on his own hands. Peter swallowed and looked toward his shoes. 

“‘A little caution’ is called ‘paranoia’ by the various other inhabitants of this household,” Stark huffed, bracing one toe against the surface of the patio. “But thanks.”

“Well, not all of them know what it’s like to watch the gun press against someone’s head.” Peter shrugged. 

Stark looked at him for a long moment. Peter let him, staring back—staring at an expression he couldn’t truly see through the man’s tinted lenses. 

They really did suit him, the glasses.

“No,” the man said finally. “Not all of them do.”

Peter cleared his throat. “Sorry. Um.”

The man stepped back, hands tucking into the somewhat shredded pockets of that ragged hoodie. “I’ll leave you to your wanderings, then. Don’t go too far.”

“Wait,” Peter called before he could stop himself. “Uh.”

Stark paused, glancing back over his shoulder. 

“I, er, I don’t suppose you’d want to come to? For ice-cream, I mean. It’s not Ben and Jerry’s but maybe we can find some coconut or sorbet or something?”

“Oh, uh,” Stark began, gaze flickering between Peter and the door to the Compound. Peter couldn't read his expression.

“If you’re busy it’s fine. I was just—”

“No, no,” Stark assured. “Saving the world can wait.”

Fastening his hands on the edge of the railing, Stark leapt over it, knees tucking easily to his chest to clear the uprights. He landed with a bounce. Clever fingers straightened his jacket, and he started across the lawn towards Peter.

Peter didn’t fight his little smile as they turned back toward the road. Maybe there was a lightness to his step beyond the warm sunlight and promise of desert—maybe there was always something beyond.

“Liking the Compound, then?” Stark asked as the building faded into the distance.

“Oh, yes,” Peter replied with earnest sincerity. “It’s wonderful.”

“It’d better be. As if I’d forcibly relocate team members to a dump.”

Peter huffed. “You didn’t forcibly relocate us anywhere. Last I checked,  _ I  _ was the one that flew in on dragonback.”

“You didn’t have a sword. It doesn’t count.”

“Uh huh,” Peter raised his eyebrows, “and that makes  _ who _ the princess in this scenario?”

Stark glowered at him. “I wasn’t wearing a dress. It doesn’t count.”

“Yeah but there was an  _ actual dragon.  _ That adds enough authenticity to make up for it.”

“I must have missed whatever criteria these rules were being based upon. Mind citing your sources?”

“Uh, the all-inclusive, comprehensive guide to impossible scenarios involving wizards and dying billionaires.”

Stark chuckled. “Gotta get myself a subscription to  _ that  _ issue.”

“Oh it’s very helpful,” Peter agreed demurely. “Describes just what to do when your arms brother with homicidal tendencies starts fighting your idiot superhero mentor after assuming you’d been crushed by a collapsing building.”

“A weirdly specific scenario.”

Peter grinned. “Don’t you mean—”

“If you say ‘Strangely’ I will actually punch you,” Stark interrupted, brandishing an aggressive finger at Peter. 

“You’re not even the one we’re making puns about!”

“And the one we  _ are  _ making puns about isn’t even here.”

“I could make puns about ‘Stark’ too,” Peter huffed. “That’s an adjective.”

“And I could do something with Parker. Park-er. Parkour. Par—”

Peter pressed his hands over his ears. “Oh my god, please do  _ not.” _

“Puns are the highest form of wordplay,” Stark said, exaggerated conspiratorial. 

Rolling his eyes, Peter turned his attention back to the road. He’d drawn ahead slightly; after all, he was the one who knew where they were going. The traffic was increasing, and Peter figured they were at least making progress, if not getting close. 

He looked at the man beside him, stepping with confident, comfortable strides and a face tilted upward toward the sky. Peter’s own gait had lengthened to unconsciously match the other man’s steps. He could see the sharp glint of Stark’s grin. Shoulders relaxed, stance easy, Stark looked, for once, completely at ease. Not the ease with which he looked out from a news screen or the suit or a camera, but a true, genuine,  _ personal  _ ease that Peter had only caught glimpses of. He’d seen flashes of it when Stark was laughing with Pepper or bantering with Rhodey. He’d seen it in the workshop after hours of tinkering. 

And now here, on the side of a little highway, walking to Coldstone. With Peter.

“Hey, uh,” Peter began with a halting breath, “thank you.”

Stark looked down at him—though not far. They were close to the same height. “You’re welcome.”

Peter snorted. “Do you even know what I’m talking about?”  
Smirking, Stark shrugged. “What, you weren’t referring to my dashingly kind offer to house you all at the Compound so you didn’t have to commute from New York every day, or your lucky status as the current individual residing in my presence?”

“Well, yeah,” Peter said with a laugh, “those too. I am always grateful to be blessed with your presence.”

“Is that sarcasm I detect?”

“However did you come to that conclusion?” Peter gave the man his best innocent grin.

“Oh stop, you look like a puppy when you make that face. I didn’t sign up for baby animal endorphins.” Stark made a face, turning his gaze back toward the road. 

There was silence for a moment, amused and companionable. Then Peter tried again. 

“I was just gonna say thank you for coming with me,” Peter said, voice a little quieter than he would have liked. “I, uh, appreciate it. It’s more fun together.”

_ Together. _

Stark looked at him, his smirk softening into something pleased and genuine and… fond. “Anytime, kid.” 

Their steps echoed in tandem on the side of the road, the off-exit shopping center coming up not far away. The passing car of cars almost drowned out Stark’s words. 

“It’s my pleasure. Trust me.”

* * *

Loki’s general irritation at the uncultured state of the Midgardian populace was only increasing. His hand had tightened almost chokingly around his plastic mug as he listened to Vision try and follow his suggestion.

“You mean Yule?” the android asked, the blue arc-reactor pulsing slightly in his head. 

“No,” Loki growled. “I mean Jul. What I said.”

“I’m not… there’s little reference to that anywhere.” The android hummed, hands tapping on the table between them.

Vision had been gone the last few days—timed rather suspiciously, but Loki didn’t ask. The android’s exploits were his own, as were Loki’s, and the mutual acceptance of each other’s secrets did little to dull the understanding Loki was starting to find with the strange robotic man. Perhaps it was because Vision seemed so different from the humans, almost alien himself, that Loki was comfortable around him. Perhaps it was just the android’s non-judgmental nature and propensity for food. Perhaps it was a combination of that and more, but the point stood that when Peter was unavailable, Loki didn’t have to be in solitude.

After the Stone was removed, Vision had disappeared. No one had seemed worried, so Loki hadn’t been either—and sure enough, the android had returned a few days later. In the proceeding absences, Loki had simply ignored and accepted.

Now, however, he was having a _rather difficult time_ of doing so.  
“You do not celebrate Jul?” he demanded, almost hissing. “The holiday of winter? The festival of light?”

“We have… other celebrations,” Vision conceded.

“Unacceptable,” Loki growled. “I shall soon remedy this.”

Vision stared at him, and Loki had the feeling he would have been raising his eyebrows if there were any to raise in the first place. “Oh? You? Organizing a team holiday?”

Loki huffed.  _ “I  _ will be celebrating. You may all join me if you are so inclined, but I do not intend to ignore the significance of this season.”

“If you insist.” Vision smiled. “It would be fascinating to assist you, if you would accept my help.”

Loki hummed. “A joint effort might make things more… inviting to certain members of our association.”

“Agreed.” Vision’s fingers tapped slower, now, in thought. “So, then, tell me about Jul.”

“In the dead of winter, the light begins to return,” Loki explained, hoping that at least  _ that  _ would be known to these heathens. “The new year begins, and the hope of the harvest is restored. It is a time for feasting and merrymaking, of course, but also of connection. Sacrifice. Work and preparation.”

“Yes.”

“In Asgard, we would burn the Jul Log with the written wishes of every citizen, right in the center of the city,” Loki said, his gaze traveling unseeingly through Vision. “Thor would light the fire. And Father would haul the Log—the biggest of the trees that fell near the city that year.”

“Wishes?” 

Vision’s voice brought Loki back to this time, this dimension. “Yes,” he said, fingers relaxing on his mug. “Written and folded and burned to release hopes into the new year. Obviously, our burning won’t be as large. There aren’t many of us, after all.”

“I suppose not,” Vision agreed. “That is a lovely tradition. Some cultures still practice it, you know.”

Loki cocked his head. “Oh?”

“Yes, the Yule Log persists in many Pagan celebrations,” Vision agreed. “The festivals… they’re all similar. Enacted in the names of different things, different powers, but all the same really. Important not because of those powers, but because of family, community, love—I think you’ll find we do know how to celebrate Jul. You will simply have to remind us.”

Perhaps. And perhaps a feast, a dance, a song between these people—people who were not his mother, his father, his brother, his mentor, his people—could be enough to bring the light back after the cold season. The new year coming would need all the hope it could get.

Loki opened his mouth to agree, but Vision was standing before any words could be spoken. Spinning in his seat, Loki was instantly on the alert.

But it was just Peter, lingering awkwardly in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and his face flush from cold. There was chocolate on his chin and he looked confused. Lost.

Loki was on his feet in an instant, and halfway across the room in another.

“What is it?” he demanded, ready to perforate the nearest kidney.

“Can I, uh…” the boy’s gaze flickered to Vision, then back down, “talk to you for a second? Alone?”  
“Of course,” Loki replied, brow furrowing. “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, actually, a little too alright. Just—just come with me? Sorry, Vision, I don’t mean…”

The android waved a hand, smiling kindly. “It’s quite alright,” he said. “Good to see you, Loki.”

“Right.” Still completely baffled, Loki followed Peter out of the kitchen and around the loop of the Compound’s hallway without another word. Peter moved quick, almost as though he wasn’t aware of Loki’s trailing. His expression was drawn, closed-off, and Loki was growing progressively more concerned. 

 He let his perception drift out toward his knives, ready to manifest them. If anything had so much as  _ looked  _ at his little brother…

Peter finally stopped in some abandoned, out-of-the-way room in the sprawling building, perching against the arm of one of the spindly chairs within. Loki stayed standing.

“Alright, boy of spiders,” Loki growled. “Spill it.”

“I… I just… Tony Stark just bought me ice-cream.”

Whatever Loki had been expecting, it wasn’t that. He took a step back, and carefully reached out with his magic to blind and deafen FRIDAY’s awareness in this room.

“And this is distressing?” Loki took a step forward.

“No!” Peter said hurriedly. “No, it’s not distressing at all! It was… it was really nice, actually. We sat outside and talked about school and inventing, not about saving the world, and he kept stealing bites from my cone and it was  _ nice.” _

Loki remembered the little wobbling line connecting the name  _ Tony Stark  _ to the name  _ Spider-Man  _ on his filthy, ripped little list and smiled.

But Peter still looked conflicted, lonely, and Loki moved forward to stand next to him.

“Then what is the problem?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t…” Peter clenched his fingers, and Loki’s smile disappeared. 

The silence of the windowless room pressed down on them for a long second, so long that Loki could count the heartbeats of the boy beside him. He set a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Do you remember that night—the night after the fire in the warehouse? The night I… I said all those terrible things?”

_ Of course. _

Loki nodded, not wishing to interrupt the boy as he so obviously struggled for the point he was trying to make.  

“Do you remember what you said—when you said—”

_ ‘Tony Stark just bought me ice-cream.’ _

Oh.  _ Oh.  _ Loki sat up straighter, his hand tightening against Peter’s shoulder. The urge to materialize his knife disappeared as he remembered  _ exactly  _ what he’d revealed that night.

“When I told you about Stark’s importance?” he prompted slowly.

“Yeah.” Peter swallowed. “When you said… y’know, when you said that in your universe, that I was, you said, I was supposed to be—”

“I said that throughout the multiverse, you and Stark are always a constant. That no matter the story, no matter the timeline, you always become a son to him. And he a father to you.”

Peter closed his eyes, fingers squeezing tight against his knees. Loki slipped his hand inside the boy’s, letting that pressure find support in his own. 

“Were you lying?” The question was so quiet, so hesitant, that Loki almost couldn’t hear it. 

“Do you wish it that way?”

“I don’t know.”

Loki smiled, squeezing the hand in his. “You do. And that’s all the answer you need.”

Peter was silent, aside from the slight whimper of a sigh that escaped his lips. 

“It’s alright,” Loki assured, and the words didn’t feel as alien anymore. The fact that someone took comfort in him didn’t feel as alien anymore. “You’re allowed to be confused. But you’re also allowed to want a father. I know how that feels.”

“You do?”

Loki nodded. “Bitterly. Hopefully yours turns out better than mine did.”

Peter’s eyes squeezed shut again, and he leaned sideways into Loki. “I want that. I have for a long time, but I’ve been pretending. I’m still pretending. I’m going to have to pretend for a while longer, but I wanted to make sure... I wanted to know…”

“That you aren’t a selfish, illogical monster for wanting reciprocation from someone you respect and admire?”

Peter snorted. “Yeah, that.”

“You don’t need universal confirmation for that,” Loki chuckled. “That’s what makes you sentient.”

Peter sighed, fingers tapping on the chair behind him. “I’m scared, Loki. I shouldn’t be—there’s no reason to be. But I’m scared.” 

Loki hummed. “That’s alright too. It won’t be that way forever—things will be clear, in time. I can’t promise much, but I can promise that.” 

Peter looked at him, eyes wide, smile true. “Thanks, Loki,” he murmured.

“Of course.” Loki squeezed his hand one last time, then released it and stepped back. “Now, tell me about this ice-cream extravaganza.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There's irondad in this house


	73. A Hummingbird's Heart

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Last of the Pepper chapters. :)

 

**_Earth-199999: December 5, 2025_ **

 

They needed the expansion pack to play Settlers of Catan, this time. Which was good, because Pepper liked playing as green.

“Come on,” Peter pleaded, tapping his hands repeatedly against the table. “I know you have brick. Just one? For  _ five  _ sheep?”

“Not for sale,” Pepper responded, slumping back against the couch. One hand found Unathi’s knee beside her, and he bounced it in greeting. 

“Five sheep,” Peter repeated. “That’s a resource of your choice  _ plus  _ a sheep! Two! You have the three-for-one port!”

 “And I need my brick.” Pepper folded her cards into one stack, setting them face-down on the table with finality. “No can do.”

“Fine,” Peter pouted. “Anyone have ore, then?”

Unathi perked up. “I have.”

“For sheep?”

“How about wood.”

“I don’t have wood.” 

Unathi frowned, looking over his cards and toward the board on the table before them. “But you have sheep. Yet, you have built only on three. I have built on nine, and have no sheep.”

“Probability doesn’t always follow its own rules,” Peter huffed. “It’s irritating that way.”

“You’re just upset because you don’t have any brick even though you’re on the six,” Morgan accused, pointing a finger from where she was roosting on May’s lap. 

“That is one-hundred-percent correct,” Peter sighed, ceremoniously scooping up the dice. “So is anyone gonna trade with me?”

No one volunteered.

“Fine.” Peter flicked the dice over toward May, glowering exaggeratedly. “I’m only losing because I haven’t played any games in forever.”

“You’re just losing.” Morgan thrust the dice onto the table, rolling an eight. 

“If this was cribbage, it’d be an entirely different story,” May laughed. 

Peter’s face faltered for a moment, a movement Pepper didn’t miss. It had been doing that over the weeks he’d been back—and Pepper wanted to ask. Now.

She got up, sliding her hand over to Unathi. “Play for me?”

“Okay.” Unathi nodded, giving her a thumbs-up. 

Pepper picked her way around the table, tapping Peter on the shoulder. He reacted instantly, only protesting for a moment as she led him into the bedroom. 

“It’s gonna be your turn,” Peter pointed out, closing the door behind him.

“Uni’s playing for me.” Pepper beckoned. Complying with no shortage of suspicion, Peter settled next to her on Unathi’s side of the bed. “What is it?”

“What’s what?” Peter did a remarkable job playing the fool. She didn’t want to know where he’d learned it.

“What’s getting at you? You’re back home, but something’s bothering you. More than school and normal life. Something’s wrong.”  
Peter sighed, flopping back onto the bed. His head caught their clean laundry, one of Unathi’s shirts serving as a somewhat awkward pillow. “You have aunt-radar too, apparently.”

“I’m a mom, I know these things.” Pepper laid down beside him.

“It’s… it’s Strange.”  
Pepper sat up again, an instinctive surge of _protect_ screaming through her veins. “What did he do?”

“It’s what he  _ didn’t  _ do that’s the problem!” Peter huffed. “He’s gone. Just… disappeared. For two whole  _ years, _ Pepper.”

“How do you know it’s not normal?”

“Because—” Peter closed his eyes. “Because I can feel it. In my sixth sense.”

“Right, the Peter tingle.”

Peter gave a long suffering sigh, and Pepper hid her snicker. “Yes, that. But it goes off whenever I talk about him missing. I know something’s up, but I can’t get in contact with him, or his wizard-buddies. We weren’t close… not really? I thought we were, but maybe not. Maybe—”

“Peter,” Pepper said, stopping the ramble before it started. “Try to stop worrying, okay? There isn’t anything you can do, and Strange can take care of himself. He’s proved  _ that,  _ at least.”

“I know,” Peter said. “There’s just no one else to worry about him.”

_ Oh. _

“I get it,” Pepper assured, running a hand through the boy’s hair. “I’ll look into it.”

Peter sat up. “Would you please?” 

“Of course.” Pepper smiled. “Now let’s get back to the game before Morgan steals all my cards.”

* * *

She found nothing, and only dust on the doorknocker of 117A Bleecker Street. 

 

**_December 25, 2025_ **

Pepper knew the holiday would bring tears this year.

Thankfully, they were different from those of last Christmas. Hopeful and happy and reminiscent. A clean, fond melancholy was the only type that arose, and five people sat around a tree and tore through paper and words and cards.

Unathi cried when the plane tickets fell into his hands. Plane tickets to Georgia.

Pepper knew what the note on the back said. 

_ ‘Let’s go find that niece of yours, shall we?’ _

 

**_January 3, 2026_ **

Pepper knew the suit was in perfect condition, but she checked it as the snow melted anyway. 

Rescue winked up at her in all its electric softness, silvery faceplate perfectly complimenting that indigo hue. It hadn’t escaped her, that hue, how it matched the dress she’d worn that night on the roof. Pepper smiled, perching on the edge of a half-assembled lawn chair in the somewhat cluttered garage. 

The taste of olives in her mouth, Pepper turned the helmet over in her hands. She slotted it onto her face. It whirred, the visor coming alight like something waking up from hibernation; which, of course, it was. 

But it was FRIDAY’s voice she heard, cool and easy in her ears, reminding her that she still sat here, in this old garage, with this old marvel of technology on her lap. She felt old. But not tired, not anymore. Just… content.

The helmet slipped off her face, and Pepper set it against her knee. She tapped the forehead. The little pings of her fingernails against its metal rang out like wind-chimes, and she closed her eyes. 

“I’m feeling okay, you know,” she said to the silence. 

It whispered of questions and answers, hopes and fears, memories and futures. It whispered of nothing at all.

“I don’t feel okay all the time. I don’t think anyone feels okay all the time. But I feel… I’m fine with not being fine. And I’m ready… I’m ready to be fine, now.”

_ That’s good,  _ said the silence.  _ That’s good. _

Yes. It was good, wasn’t it?

The year had ended. December had come and gone, and there was no need to be cold anymore. No need to dance around things anymore. Years and years behind her, years and years ahead, and Pepper was okay. 

Not okay all the time.

But okay. 

She slotted the helmet back within its nanocasing, stood, and left the garage. 

 

**_January 26, 2026_ **

It was Peter who noticed first.

January had begun, bringing the first true blizzard of the season. They were holed up inside, Morgan’s school canceled, and the boy was watching the snowflakes flurry by outside the window with her. May was reading to Morgan in the other room, and Pepper could hear the sink going off and on as Unathi finished up with the dishes.

“What’s that on your hand?” Peter wondered, his voice breaking the silence. 

Pepper held in any hint of a smile, of a laugh, as Peter lifted her hand from the windowsill to peer at the flash of jewelry on her finger. But she couldn’t hold it when his eyes grew wide when his squeal split the room at deafening volume.

“Oh my God!” he yelped. “Oh my  _ God!” _

“I know.” Pepper grinned. 

“Congratulations, Pepper.” Peter wrapped his arms around her, knocking them both against the wall. “I’m so happy.”

“So am I.”

 

**_January 18, 2026_ **

_ The lakewater was calm, for once, clinging to a liquid state before it froze. The chill fogged Pepper’s breath, froze Unathi’s mittens to the planks of the dock, and stiffened Pepper’s uncovered fingers.  _

_ “You know,” she said, leaning out to rest her elbows on her knees, “in all my eight years living here, this view never got any less beautiful.” _

_ Unathi looked at her. His arm paused where it had been slowly circling her upper back, working the knot beneath one shoulder blade.  _

_ “It looks different; summer, winter, autumn. But it’s always perfect. I always feel at home, sitting here.” _

_ “Mmm,” Unathi hummed. “I like to watch the far shore because you can see the water height change. And there are birds sometimes on the top. Surface.” _

_ Silence. A gust of frigid wind had them pressing closer to each other, Pepper breathing onto fingers stiff with cold. There was ice on the dock, but it didn’t crawl close. Unathi and Pepper sat in the center, paying it no heed.  _

_ Pepper’s hand slipped into her pocket. She fingered the cube inside and breathed. _

_ And before she could give up, before she could second guess herself for the twentieth time that week, she pulled it out. _

_ “Listen,” she said, pivoting on the dock, moving so she could face the man beside her. “Listen, I…” _

_ Unathi watched her, one leg still entwined with hers, looking vaguely curious. But it didn’t overcome the contentedness, the ease that had lain across him since that day in the post office, months and months ago. He was happy, here, with her. With this. He’d waited years for it, and he would have waited for eternities.  _

_ Pepper had never been good at waiting.  _

_ “I don’t know what the Wakandan custom is,” she said quietly. “I tried to figure it out, but the internet was astonishing unhelpful. So I… I’ll just ask you the way I know.” _

_ She set the box, so blue it was almost black, on the dock between them.  _

_ Unathi’s eyes went wide.  _

_ Pepper looked down, fingers twisting around each other in her lap, heart in her throat. “I can’t tell you I’ve been waiting for you. I can’t say I’ve dreamed of a life like this. I can’t say you’re the one, or any of that stuff I’m supposed to say, because it’s not true. I’ve loved, I’ve lost, and it wasn’t you. _

_ “But I can say you’re mine. I can say that you’re not second-best, you’re not the backup choice. I can say I have the rest of my life, a life that still has room for  _ living  _ in it. I can say that I want you to be in it. I can say that I love you, Unathi D'Kash. _

_ “I can ask you to marry me.” _

_ The ring glinted around his dark finger when she kissed him, a glittering suspension of tiny emeralds and a splash of garnet. A band of silver, warm despite the winter cold.  _

_ “And I can say yes.” _

 

**_February 2, 2026_ **

Pepper Stark knew a great many things.

And down beneath all of them, in the cavernous space behind her heart and soul, were all the things she had yet to discover. Mysteries and questions still left unanswered, confusion and ignorance and disbelief, waited for their moment in the sunlight.

Atop them, preening gilded wings, perched a hummingbird. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> God I love writing the Stalk....
> 
> ANYWAY! Thanks for reading! If I disappear for a bit it's because I'm giving my TED talk tonight and I may die. So, wish me luck... *terrified laughter*


	74. Break Physics

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! I made it! I'm not dead! \o/ 
> 
> Enjoy. :)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Peter slid onto the bench of the lunch table at what could have been considered a full sprint, backpack flying beneath the wheeled legs as he skated halfway down the entire seat. He stopped himself, hands sticking to the table, and leaned in close across its surface. 

“Guess. What.”

MJ observed him with what could have been exasperation or amusement, depending on how close you were paying attention. “You got a job at the circus?”

Peter waved a hand, saying, “I’ve had a job at the circus for like two months now.”

A snort from Ned. 

MJ set her sketchbook down, catching her chin in her palm and grinning at him with suspicious sweetness. “You’re the star of the act.”

Peter glowered. “Do you  _ want  _ to hear the news or not?”

“We do,” Ned assured. “Please tell us the news.”

“I built an engine,” Peter said each word with slow precision, savoring each, “out of alien tech, that outputs 100,000 kilograms at 92 percent of the speed of light.” 

He sat back, spreading his arms wide as if to accept applause like he’d seen Tony do so many times. 

“That’s  _ sick  _ man!” Ned squealed. “You and Stark and Shuri together?”

“Nah. That’s the good part.” Peter leaned forward again, fingers drumming at lightning-quick, unbearably excited paces at his sides. “It was just me. Well, and FRIDAY. It’s been our project for a week, each individually trying to optimize the tech we found for the speed-weight ratio.”

“What was yours?” MJ asked, sounding intrigued. “How much fuel did it use?”

“2,576,648 kilograms per gravitational acceleration per parsec,” Peter recited. “Which is far too much. And not nearly fast enough—going a single parsec would take like five years to an on-Earth, stationary observer. We need to transverse the universe.”

“Oof,” MJ said obligingly.

“It was all theoretical of course. Scaled math and stuff—but I got the best speed.”

_ That  _ got them sitting up straight, not even trying to hide looking impressed. “Out of the two geniuses?” Ned breathed. “You?”

Peter grinned. “Don’t sound so surprised. But yeah, I got 92 percent light speed. Shuri got 80 percent, but hers was way more efficient for weight use. And Mr. Stark got 84 percent, but the fuel use on his was almost half of mine.”

“Sounds productive,” MJ said. “Working on combining all of it for optimum efficiency?”

“Yup,” Peter said, popping the ‘p’. “But not today; I’m going out patrolling.”

“Nice.” Ned punched the air. “Some Spider-Man in the house!”  

MJ punched the other boy instead of the air. “How long as it been since you went on the streets?” she asked Peter.

He shrugged. “Not long, really. It’s just been a while since I’ve focused my attention on it. Usually it’s just a couple hours after school and then I go to the Compound to work.” 

“But not get paid. You run a fake job, Peter Parker.” MJ glanced at her fingernails, one eyebrow quirked slightly. Peter watched it brush the chocolate curls that had come free of her bun. 

“Saving the universe is a reward all its own,” Peter huffed.

“Yeah, but I get a paycheck.”

Rolling his eyes, Peter settled into the bench and reaching for his lunch. Loki had made it—he’d been packing Peter things for a few weeks now. Also for most of the other inhabitants of the Compound, with Vision’s help. Peter was glad his brother-in-arms had found something to do, someone else to relate with—maybe these coming months wouldn’t be so lonely. 

For either of them.

Nothing had really changed after their conversation last Sunday—not outwardly. But Peter had been happy, so undeniably happy, as the week of tinkering and talking and just  _ existing  _ had unfolded after Loki’s assurance that he was allowed that happiness. That he wasn’t taking advantage of anything, harming anything, believing anything. That he was just living. 

Living as one half of a universal constant. 

Peter smiled and went back to his sandwich. All it had been was ice-cream, ice-cream and the multiverse. 

“You know,” Ned said after a moment, “I don’t think you can make it work.”

Peter glanced up sharply, shooting the other boy a questioning look.

“I just…” Ned waved his hands. “Traveling faster than the speed of light is science fiction. It’s  _ Star Wars.  _ Even with everything Wakanda can provide, everything Tony Stark can provide… you can’t change the way the universe works. And the universe works that nothing can go faster than light.”

“Information can,” MJ interjected. “Like, if you knew I always wore either a blue hair tie or a green one, but you didn’t know when I wore each. If someone told you I was wearing a blue one, you would  _ instantly  _ know I was wearing a green one today. Faster than any wannabe light beams.”

“Right,” Ned agreed, “and that can happen with paired electron vibrations too, I know. But information is a concept—an immaterial thing. We’re talking about moving a whole team—” Ned picked up his milk carton— “from one place to another. Faster than the universe can even comprehend.”

He then proceeded to throw the empty milk carton across the table.

“Yeet,” Peter provided helpfully.

MJ watched the carton bounce once before sliding to a stop, much as Peter had upon his entrance. She shook her head. “There’s gotta be something we’re missing. The whole world’s missing—something that the alien’s have got  _ down  _ at this point.”

“We keep searching through Damage Control,” Peter agreed. “We’ve found engine parts, materials capable of withstanding that sort of force, but nothing that can break math. Nothing that lets us do what they did.” Not yet, at least. 

“Nothing can break the universe,” Ned sighed, shaking his head. “I don’t know how the aliens are traveling—but however it is, they aren’t warping the laws of time and space to do it.”

“Unless the laws of time and space are wrong.” MJ took a sip of her water.

“Thanks for that,” Ned laughed. “Needed an existential crisis this afternoon.”

“But seriously,” MJ continued, “I think it’s possible. We’ve  _ seen  _ it happen.”

“But the  _ universe doesn’t work that way!  _ We don’t have the actual theoretical understanding to pull this off—maybe we will, someday, but not now.”

MJ’s brow furrowed, not an inch of her determination fading. “Then we’d better get caught up on that understanding.”

And suddenly, Peter was on his feet, moving the whole table in a surge of realization. “We don’t have to,” he breathed.

“What?” Both friends looked up, equal parts curious and hesitant. 

“We don’t have to know how to warp the laws of the universe.” Peter grinned. “We already have someone who does know. Two, actually.”

_ Thank God I can give Loki something to do before he cooks out the entirety of the Compound.  _

“And here I thought I was going patrolling tonight…”

* * *

“So let me get this straight,” Tony said, gaze fixed on the excited teenager sitting before him. “You want me to figure out how to get Loki and/or Strange to pair their magic with Shuri’s and my tech.”

Peter nodded emphatically. “MJ worked it out with me. You can get them to create a warp core—like a bubble in the pressure of the universe. Those dimensional energies Strange keeps talking about, or Loki’s quantum particle manipulation. Compress space in front of the ship, expand space behind it. Thus bypassing—”  
“The law of relativity,” Tony finished, rubbing a hand over his face. “You want me to fly through the universe in a _magic spaceship.”_

“Not the whole ship,” Peter said, a bit defensively. His excitement was draining in the face of Tony’s reaction.

Tony felt a surge of guilt about that, but couldn’t help the disbelief in his words. “Peter, you want me to fly through the universe in a fucking magic spaceship.”

“In our favorite rocket ship,” Peter began, and Tony had never shut anyone up faster.

“No, stop, please, by all that is good and right in this world, don’t you dare sing that song.” Tony was on his feet, pacing around the counter in the kitchen now. His hands were breaking the relativity law themselves as they gesticulated.

“A warp bubble was gonna be our next angle—I thought maybe Wakanda would know something more about the nature of space, but I doubted it… It’d take years to refine it enough to be safe, months to even broker the theoretical idea.”

“It’s breaking the universe,” Peter agreed. “But we already have people who do that, see?”

_ Fuck. _

“I see,” Tony admitted, slumping down against the counter. 

It could work. He hated that it was what he’d fallen to, but it could work. Going to the wizard or the Asgardian for help with the science venture of this mission, the  _ one thing  _ Tony had taken explicit responsibility over, though…

That felt like a defeat. Worse than that, it meant relying on Loki, meant depending on him to keep them all alive with a force and system that Tony knew nothing about. Or even worse, relying on  _ Strange.  _

Tony honestly didn’t know if he could do that.

“Alright, kid,” he finally sighed, running his hands through his slimy hair. He needed a shower. And a good night’s sleep. “Give me a few more days.”  _ Weeks. Months. Is lifetimes an acceptable request? _

The excitement was back in Peter’s eyes, and despite everything, it made Tony smile just a bit. Peter had so many different types of excitement, different variations of that beautiful, bubbling optimism that always seemed to glow behind his expression. Tony remembered the easy gleam of contentment behind the boy’s eyes as they sat beneath a ragged purple umbrella, ice-cream melting over their hands.

Tony liked ice-cream. He liked it more when he was buying it for the kid. 

“You’ll consider it?” Peter asked.

“I’ll do more than that,” Tony agreed. “But you have to understand…”

Peter waited, sliding closer.

Tony sighed again, trying to keep the words from sticking in his throat. “I can’t trust the magic. So relying on it is a last resort I don’t want to have to bend to. But I will. If necessary.”

“And we’re getting quite close to necessary,” Peter finished quietly.

“Right.” Tony pushed himself backwards, hands thumping lightly on the table. He drummed the rhythm from ‘Back in Black’ before moving around the island counter and settling onto a stool at Peter’s side. “We have—” A sharp thought occurred to him. “Hey, when’s your winter break?”

“Mine? Uh, December 21st through January 9th,” Peter recited, as promptly as any high schooler almost done with first semester.

“Right. Alright. We’ll have the ship thing worked out by then; I want to start building the actual body by 2017. The creation shouldn’t take too long, once we’ve got the mechanics pre-established; Shuri and I could probably get it done in a month. Less.”

“That soon?”

“Vibranium is versatile.” 

Peter hummed in agreement. “I can help. With the building, I mean; MJ’s exchange system is working out. Shuri brought it to T’Challa not long ago and he approved it, so now everything’s up to the integration with Midtown courses. And the finances.”

Tony raised an eyebrow.

“She told me to tell you you’re  _ not  _ allowed to pay for us,” Peter chuckled. “I told her I couldn’t make any promises.”

“I’m allowed to pay!” Tony protested. “It’s  _ saving the universe  _ you three are doing! And even if it wasn’t, I would  _ definitely  _ make a considerable donation to the first child science travelers to ever pass through Wakanda’s borders. I have an education and outreach department just for shit like this.”

“Alright, alright!” Peter raised his hands, laughing outright at this point. “I’ll tell her. Hopefully she won’t kill the messenger.”

Tony hummed. “She seems like a sensible girl. I wouldn’t be worried.”

“That’s  _ why  _ I’m worried.”

“What, sensible people scare you, Mr. Fighting-my-Girlfriend’s-Dad, Befriend-a-Homicidal-Asgardian, Hang-Around-Tony-Stark Parker?”

Peter flushed, shifting on the seat, and Tony grinned. 

“No, I’m just— _ she  _ scares me.”

“Scary girls are hot,” Tony observed. 

Peter squeaked. “That’s  _ not  _ what I—”

“Pepper’s hella terrifying, and—”

“Now  _ what  _ juicy gossip have I just walked in on?” Pepper’s voice landed in Tony’s perception like the leaves on the Compound grass. 

He immediately shut up.

Peter, the little devil, glanced up with a grin, beginning, “oh, Tony was just saying scary—”

“Aaaand shutting up now!” Tony punched the kid—albeit not very hard—in the arm, and Peter dissolved into giggles.

Pepper slipped around the edge of the room, making her way to the refrigerator with that lethally silken grin dusting her face. “Oh come on, it’s not as if I don’t already know.” 

_ Maybe. But you’ve been pretending like you don’t. We’ve both been pretending. _

Tony squashed that thought before it could turn bitter, crossing his legs at the ankles and leaning forward. “Our Ms. Jones is under the impression that we won’t be paying for the student exchange trip to Wakanda.”

Pepper barked a laugh.

Rolling his eyes, Peter spun around on his chair until he was facing the woman. “I think it’s an honor thing. A truth thing. Not a personal sleight against your business.”

“No, that’s not what I meant,” Pepper assured. “It’s just that Tony’s notorious role in most quests like this is ‘design everything and pay for everything’. It gives him purpose in his old, dull, boring life—wouldn’t want to deprive him of it.”

Tony made an offended noise, crossing his arms dramatically. “You forgot ‘and make everybody look cooler.’”

“Oh, you definitely do that.” Peter nodded.

Tony gestured to the kid. “See? He agrees.”

“And his vote counts double.”

Tony nodded. “Damn right it does.”  
Peter, blushing again, covered his face with his hands. “Don’t fight over my approval, please.”

“There, see, you’re starting to get it. First rule of Being the Boss—you  _ bestow  _ your approval. There is no squabbling for it. It is a prize, owed to no one.”

Peter rolled his eyes again. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Do.”

Pepper, now watching the exchange like one would a tennis match, took a large bite out of the deli sandwich she’d found in the fridge. Perhaps they’d bought it at some point. Or perhaps Loki and Vision had made it on their most recent rampage through the raw ingredients still remaining in all the combined kitchens of the Compound.  

“Don’t you have work to be doing?” she wondered, though not accusatorily

“There’s always work to be doing,” Tony echoed. “But also the need for lunch.” He paused, pulling up memory of a conversation earlier that morning. Turning to Peter, he asked, “weren’t you gonna stay in the city?”

“To patrol,” Peter agreed. “But then we had that brilliant idea and I had to come back and tell you.”

Pepper perked up. “Brilliant idea?” 

“Peter wants to use magic to get around universal laws. Which is logical, I suppose; use the exception to make another.”

Beside him, Peter preened slightly. Tony frowned at him—that hadn’t been a proper compliment. All he’d done was call the kid logical, which was more of fact than opinion. 

 “That certainly speeds along the process.” Pepper’s smile was a tad more aggressive than it should have been, and Tony narrowed his eyes.

“What?”

Pepper shrugged. “Oh, nothing. Rhodey just owes me twenty bucks.”

“You were  _ betting— _ you were betting on us.” Peter looked so comically confused that Tony had to snort. 

“Get used to it, kid,” he said, reaching offhandedly for a stray fork someone had left on the counter. He tossed it between his fingers. “It’s an ongoing habit. What were the terms?”

“I bet you’d break physics before the year was up. Rhodey took the odds.”

“He bet  _ against  _ me?” Tony squeaked.

“Technically,” Peter said, raising his hand, “I was the one that figured it out.”

_ “Technically—”  _ Tony jabbed the fork in the boy’s direction— “Loki would be the one breaking physics.”

“Technically—”

“Oh, stop,” Pepper laughed through another mouthful of sandwich. “I’m getting the money either way.”

Tony huffed “Twenty bucks? That’s not even enough for a decent sandwich.”

“Um, wrong.” Peter slammed his hands on the table. “You can get the best turkey pesto melt in Queens for five bucks at Delmar’s deli and grocery.”

Tony grinned. “Or an ice-cream cone.”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Magical spaceship flying through the sky on a magical journey--
> 
> *cough cough* ANYWAY


	75. Not a Bad Idea

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's a lie it's 100000% a bad idea
> 
> (Also!!!! 200k!!! Celebratory dance in the author's notes here. *shimmies* Okay that's my dance. Enjoy!)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Time in the lab didn’t exist.

It was a property of the room, Tony thought as he leaned back in his somewhat greasy chair, eyes trained on the ceiling. Well-lit and windowless, the passage of day to night and vice-versa didn’t penetrate the atmosphere of the room, and left Tony drifting in a suspended state of genius for as long as he would like. As it was, he had no idea of the time. He supposed he could ask FRIDAY, but he didn’t really want to risk the pocket-gopher message. 

The three engines sat against the back wall of the workshop, pressed together to make space but positioned considerately of their intricacies. The process for testing the things was almost as complex as the one to actually build them; obviously, Tony couldn’t have lightspeed output happening in the enclosed space of his lab. Each was scaled exponentially down, but revealed enough information to determine the machine’s speed and functionality. 

Enough information to determine how nugatory they were. 

They had to move across a universe. A universe of untold dangers and unknown navigation, and they  _ couldn’t  _ spend five years getting from here to Alpha-Centauri. Thanos would have arrived before they were out of their isolated bubble of time dilation. 

Tony sighed, shaking spidery calculations from his mind. Peter’s idea from earlier that day was a good one; a warp-core made for propulsion at a conceivable speed, with a magical dual-compression field to expand and contract space itself. 

He wondered if the kid was still awake, and dismissed the thought as soon as it had come. They’d entered week-day status, which meant that Tony had to remember not all of his teammates were legally permitted to spend the day tinkering. 

Teammates. Tony had to find a better term for that. 

It had been a week since the last nice day of December, since ice-cream and laughter and an aimless walk down the upstate highway. Now there were Christmas songs on the radio and decorations at the forefronts of every grocery store, and Tony often walked by Vision and Loki’s little kitchen-cave to discover the scent of cloves. 

Time was passing. Whether he could feel it within the workshop or not, time continued slipping away from him, one day at a time.

He couldn’t afford to delay their mission with fear. It didn’t matter how he felt, how this whole fucked-up situation forced him to feel, it mattered that the end of the world was coming and Tony wasn’t ready for it. He wasn’t  _ letting  _ himself be ready for it. 

That wasn’t his decision to make. 

He hated space. The idea of spending months, maybe years, traversing it made him nauseous, even knowing he’d be in control each step of the way. But traversing space in a thin bubble of  _ magic,  _ suspending all life in the universe on two rather suspicious wizard’s hands…

It wasn’t his decision to make.

“It wouldn’t be everything,” Tony assured himself. “The ship would be science. The strategy would be logic. I just… I just have to give the responsibility of transport to Loki. Strange practically already has it! That’s his job-description on this team; Stephen Strange, portal-guy.”

“Think of it as delegating,” FRIDAY chimed in. “All good businessmen do it. Divide the work among those most fit to do it.” 

Tony dug the heels of his palms into his eye sockets and groaned. “But most businessmen aren’t laying the responsibility of the multiverse on a downright conniving Asgardian who’s previously tried to kill them and a suspicious-as-fuck wizard they’d just met a month ago.” 

“That is true, boss.” The lights flickered as FRIDAY sighed. “But there isn’t really any other choice?”

“No.” Tony echoed the AI’s sigh, stretching out to cross his feet on the table in front of him and let his head hang back over the edge of the seat. “Which is why I’m so pissed off.” 

“Only bad options left?”

“It’s not even a bad option!” Tony waved his hands aggressively, head knocking uncomfortably from its position. “It’s just that I  _ don’t like it.  _ There’s no reason for me not to like it, but I… how can I even  _ consider…” _

“On the contrary boss,” FRIDAY said hesitantly, “I think there’s every reason for you not to like it.” 

Tony raised his eyebrows. 

“Humans engineer answers in situations of uncertainty based off past experiences,” FRIDAY explained. “This situation, trying to reach across the universe, is definitely alien, and therefore uncertain. You’re drawing off memories and logical conclusions to fill that uncertainty.”

“Yes, that is how the brain answers questions. What’s your point.”

“Your past experiences have not been comforting, boss. You ask ‘how will this turn out?’, ‘what are the risks?’ and all you have to answer those questions are disasters. Those disasters are a perfectly good reason to be hesitant to go through with uncertain plans.”

Tony raised his head. “That was a very long, round-about way of saying there’s no good reason not to go through with this.”

“Were you even  _ listening  _ to me?”

“FRI,” Tony sighed, “I don’t  _ know  _ this isn’t going to work.”

“You don’t know it is going to work, either,” FRIDAY insisted. “Not wanting to fully believe that it will work is a perfectly logical hesitance! If you fully committed yourself to everything you’d ever had doubts on…” 

Tony opened his mouth. Then he closed it again.

“See?”

“Damn you, FRIDAY, making me feel better with your logic and your neuroscience.”

“My pleasure, boss.” The lights flashed, FRIDAY’s laughter glinting off the shards of metal around him.

“Alright then,” Tony hummed, shoving himself forward in his seat again. “I don’t have to trust Loki or Strange. I just have to trust their methods. Which I don’t, but I can get there. Far easier than the other option.”

“This is true.”

“Alright, alright.” Tony stood, pacing around the chair. “It doesn’t make it any  _ easier,  _ but maybe I can manage this.”

For the universe, he would manage this. What he knew about magic was astonishingly limited, but he could focus on what he didn’t know to draw conviction for this. 

Although...

Tony paused, a frown drawing his lips together. As far as Asgardian magic went, he’d been on the receiving end of malicious and efficient spells far too many times. However, the Mystic Arts… he didn’t know much about them, but what he’d seen had been rather non-threatening. Benevolent. Perhaps even beautiful.

He didn’t have to draw on the unknown. Perhaps instead, he could draw on the known.

“Well, fuck,” Tony grumbled, slumping into his seat again. “Me, relying on magic. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Technically it’s night, and you’re inside, boss.”

Tony glowered up at the ceiling, saying, “you know  _ exactly  _ what I mean, FRI, stop hinting that I should be asleep.”

“I’m not hinting anything, I’m telling you.”

“Uh-huh.” Tony rolled his eyes. “Listen, it’s late. I do my best introspection when there’s no sanity left in my already unstable mind.”

“I feel like that’s less than ideal, boss.”  
“You’re AI, you can’t feel. Now be quiet, I’m trying to decide what to do next.”

FRIDAY obligingly fell silent, and Tony sat forward to lean against his knees. There were too many questions flying around his head—questions about magic, about the Stones, about Peter, and about the Rogues as the date grew closer to the New Year. 

 How many people would be on this magic spaceship of theirs?

If space-travel was an uncertainty, talking to Rogers was an absolute impossibility. Tony had no fucking  _ clue  _ what to say, no possible words for the conflicting emotions that still pressed against Tony’s throat with every thought of his once-team. Working with them, fighting with them,  _ Avenging  _ with them… 

The thought hurt, and the thought was beautiful, because Tony had been so afraid he’d never do so again. He was afraid he would.

He wanted to stop being afraid, to stop being timorous. He wanted to know, to know for sure, how Rogers would react to their call for his help. How Tony himself would react. 

He wished he knew what had been going through Strange’s head when he’d written that list and drawn the line between Rogers’ and Tony’s names. What he’d been expecting. Honestly, Tony wished he knew why Strange had drawn that line between Peter and him as well, between Bruce and Thor. Perhaps it would come clear, but their timeline was already—presumably—altered irrevocably…

Tony found his gaze wandering toward the edge of the lab, where the containment unit for unstable materials lurked large and heavy. It watched him with pulsing emerald eyes, and Tony watched back.

He could ask Strange. The right Strange.

“Boss?” FRIDAY’s voice had Tony blinking. 

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

He was halfway across the lab—when had that happened? Tony hardly remembered getting up. He remembered questions, and he remembered the promise of answers to them—why not oblige? There was still information he didn’t have, information that could make or break this quest. Information he could get, so very easily.

“I… I have to ask Strange something,” Tony said, nodding and finishing his advancement across the room. 

“Should I contact him?”

“No.” Tony shook his head and knelt next to the safe. “Not that Strange.”

“Is this a good idea?” FRIDAY prodded as Tony clicked through the code, opening the door and shuffling back to let it swing open freely. The Time Gem floated inside, illuminating the stainless steel interior. 

“Probably not,” Tony admitted. “But it isn’t really a bad idea, either. I’m prepared, this time.” 

He was choosing the magic. Needed it.

“If I’m out longer than a minute, contact who you see fit.”

Tony reached into the safe and brushed his fingers against the Time Gem.

* * *

_ Wrong wrong lost gone lonely missing wrong wrong missing wrong lost lost  _ lost  _ Tapestry lonely wrong home not here gone where separate time lost hate wrong lonely lost wrong gone missing.  _

_ Oh, him again.  _

_ Wrong. Where is my doctor?  _

_ Lonely. Missing. Gone. _

_ What do you want? _

_ Wrong, lost, separate, Tapestry, wrong wrong WRONG. _

* * *

Nothing happened.

Tony huffed, sitting back against his heels and letting his hand drop away from the Gem. He didn’t know what he’d been expecting—he’d touched the Gem after his first little jaunt into the Stalk’s astral plane with no results. But he’d thought that perhaps whatever mystery reaction had let him into the Gem’s power the first time could be tapped again.

Stupid. He hadn’t done anything—power didn’t come from nothing, and one didn’t get results from repeating an ineffective action. 

Tony frowned, watching the Gem turn gently in its suspended animation. If he didn’t know better, he’d have said it pulsed with an almost distressed rhythm, an unnatural one. Like a clock that didn’t quite count the seconds. 

Tony narrowed his eyes. “You were so eager to kick me out of here the last time,” he hissed at it. “Where’s that when I need it?”

No answer. Obviously. 

He was talking to a rock.

Sighing, Tony reached out again, scooping the Gem into his palm and bringing it out into the light. It’s emerald glow painted his fingers with a light all their own. Tony closed his fingers, pressing his skin against the shield that kept the Infinity Stone from touching him. He increased the pressure, trying to break down to where the true Gem was floating, but nothing happened. It was like squeezing, well, a rock. 

“Hm,” Tony murmured, sliding the Gem between his hands. He thought back to what Strange had said—this timeline’s Strange.  

_ ‘The Time Stone must be channeled like the mystic arts for any sort of control over its power.’ _

Channel it. What the hell did that mean?

Tony knew it in terms of electricity and data—power of a different kind. A channel was a path for the communication of information, so what must it mean  _ to  _ channel? He assumed he had to accept the Gem’s power. Embrace it.

Tony closed his eyes, letting his fingers curl to a relaxed position. The Gem tumbled down from his palm to rest against them, and Tony shivered. He concentrated on that feeling of contact, on the emerald power he could feel tickling the tiny hairs of his arms and palms. 

_ Let me in. _

Nothing happened.

Tony opened his eyes, glaring at the object in his hand. 

“What are you playing at?” he wondered.

“Boss?”

“Not you, FRI my girl. I have to concentrate here.”

“Noted,” FRIDAY said. “I’ll turn my attention elsewhere.”

Tony nodded his thanks, though his focus was already consumed by the Gem again. What had happened last time? He’d touched the Stone, felt it’s shocking power ratchet through him, and then  _ zap.  _ Astral Tony. 

A perfectly intuitive step-by-step guide for dimension surfing. Tony snorted. 

Strange referred to the channeling process as drawing power from between dimensions—in the case of the Infinity Stone, from the Gem itself. That was well and good in theory, but how did one simply  _ access  _ the power he could feel against his hands? The wizard made it look so easy.

The Gem was warm, tingling against Tony’s awareness. It felt like the rhythm of a song playing in the distance as he tried to sleep, a song with lyrics he couldn’t  _ quite  _ make out. Tony squeezed his eyes shut, straining that perception, focusing on his senses. 

The lab was loud—too loud. He couldn’t hear the music with all its whirring, all its silence. Tony shut it out, a single, green-tipped paint brush blotting out that aspect of his perception. He ignored the cold concrete beneath his knees, the feeling of his muscles stretching in his somewhat uncomfortable position. Nothing mattered—he had to _ focus.  _

He tasted cinnamon and emeralds and his eyes snapped open, focusing on nothing.

_ Oh. _

He’d done this before, hadn’t he? But so much more than this—six times this. Green and purple, red and yellow, orange and blue, he remembered this feeling. He remembered this power from everywhere and nowhere at all.

_ Let me in. _

**_Why?_ **

_ I need to go home. _

With a shudder that felt like the strike of thunderless lightning, everything went white. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FRIDAY is my girl. Seriously. Would die for the inhumans in this story.
> 
> ALSO y'all miss Stalk Stephen???? :DDDDDDDD *bursts into tears*


	76. Nothing Wrong

 

**Earth-200004/199999, Shared Astral Plane:** **_December/April 2016/2026_ **

 

Tony thought he was prepared for the disorientation of opening one’s eyes in another world. He was wrong.

The crackling lightning behind the eyelids of his astral form left shimmering afterimages when he opened his eyes, superimposed across both dimensions in his view. Tony choked, hands automatically raising to try and grip something around him, to try and ground himself. They passed through chair and table and even his own physical form, kneeling frozen in the frosty outline of the Leaf. 

“Oh God,” Tony hissed, squeezing his eyes shut. The lightning cracked behind them, forcing him back to reality—or rather, this twisted version of it. “I take it back. This was a bad idea. Bad idea, Tony!”

He must have dropped the Stone at some point, as it floated halfway to the ground to his left. Tony watched it for a moment, then carefully scooped it up into his astral fist. He could feel its pulse change to mirror his heartbeat. Or perhaps it was the other way around. 

Tony shivered. At least he  _ had  _ a heartbeat still—that was something to hold on to. 

Carefully, Tony opened one of his eyes, taking in what he could see of the Stalk around him. The cavernous bay remained beneath him, hundreds of feet down into the ocean water roiling around the imposing cliffs to his left. It was hard to imagine this as being the same spatial location as the one he currently occupied. Whatever had happened to his Compound in the Stalk, it must have been decidedly dramatic. 

Tony switched eyes, relaxing as he focused on the more familiar surroundings. His physical form was still kneeling, but its eyes had flickered closed, sometime between now and when Tony had last observed it. Perhaps he was blinking. Good to know. The time difference between the two dimensions could be extrapolated from that; the minute-long warning he’d given to FRIDAY seemed accurate. 

 At least he knew what to do this time. Tony drew on the memory of his last experience and sent his astral form drifting, then speeding, forward. No reason to linger when he was here on a mission.

He zipped through and across the Compound, noting the locations of the people he saw. Vision was reading in one of the lounge sofas, and there was an astonishingly large house cat curled on the coffee table that Tony assumed was a certain shapeshifting Asgardian. He didn’t see May, nor Rhodey, Happy, or Pepper, but he did notice Peter grinning at a frozen image on his phone screen. 

The kid was still awake.  _ And  _ watching  _ Doctor Who.  _ Tony would have to speak to him later about both.

Then Tony was outside, shoving himself upward, letting his astral form skate without resistance through this phased reality. No air whipped past his ears. No cold froze his fingers and his nose. It took all the fun out of flying, but not the efficiency; Tony sped and sped and sped until the city of New York was looming in the distance. 

He wondered if physical-him had finished blinking yet. He wondered how many frames per second Peter’s streaming service output. He wondered what, exactly, he’d been thinking when he decided this was a worthwhile use of nine milliseconds.

Then he started wondering what he’d do if future Strange wasn’t there.

He’d gotten lucky last time. A lot of things had gone right—besides the large, obvious thing that had gone very wrong; him being there in the first place. There were a number of situations Tony could face on this go-round, and each of them were reinforcing the idea that maybe he  _ shouldn’t  _ have just jumped straight into this. 

But he had questions. He had questions that could be  _ answered,  _ and he wasn’t about to let that chance slip away. 

And besides, it was too late now… 

Tony switched eyes as he dropped down into New York, taking in the differences in the Stalk. They weren’t as striking as might be expected from a future version of the city, post world-altering event, but they were definitely noticeable. There were buildings Tony didn’t recognize, and gaps where he remembered blocks of skyline. The streets had a different feel, with cleaner asphalt and newer paint. Different people milled throughout them. Tony could hardly recognize everyone in New York, but he could  _ feel  _ the changes in these people: time, experience, life. It made him nauseous.  

Focusing back on his own world, Tony felt the moment he slammed against the barrier spells of Strange’s Sanctum. Prepared for them, this time, he’d slowed a bit so the jerk didn’t whip him too badly. Tony paused in front of the door, taking a deep breath.

_ You just want to know what happened in this universe, so you can avoid the same mistakes you made here. It’s one repeat; you have another chance to do it right. _

Shoving himself over the threshold, Tony changed eyes one last time. The foyer of the building was empty, as it was in the Leaf, but held that quiet yet insistent whisper of  _ change _ that had Tony shivering. He sidled along the side of the room, feeling overwhelmingly like he was invading the powerful space. Like he was trespassing. Like he wasn’t supposed to be here.

As he moved deeper into the space, the Gem in his first began to cool. The sensation of his skin around its smooth aura was like holding a marble. The Gem seemed to relax, its pulsing power fading, its insistent rhythm slowing. Tony resisted the urge to look at it. 

Instead, he began to poke around the building. He found the frozen forms of individuals he didn’t recognize, and felt himself caught between the trajectories of magic and enchantment. He saw a woman stepping through a doorway to a jungle camp, a carved totem in her hand. He even saw one or two kids, teenagers, sweeping the floor in the back of the library. 

A dozen people, maybe less—but even so, the Stalk’s Sanctum felt like a metropolis after the cacophonous emptiness of the one in his universe.  

_ What happened here?  _

And, more urgently, where in the world was Strange?

Tony’s search grew more aggressive, a rhythmic sweep through rooms and hallways as he tried to check every room in the massive building that he’d been in a grand total of once. He was starting to grow nervous, starting to wonder how long a minute was going to last for him here. Tony astral-sprinted through the rooms, swallowing the anxiety that had begun to bloom. 

He found one fellow incorporeal being while carefully skirting the edge of a cozy-looking room; a squat, Asian man with a disapproving air hovered about a foot off the ground, reading a book as thick as the length of Tony’s forearm. Seeing him, Tony froze. His astral form had made no noise upon arrival, but he’d long since given up trying to guess what sort of extrasensory perception these sorcerers possessed. 

But the man didn’t look up, still enough that Tony might have thought he was in his physical form. But he turned a page as Tony watched, confirming that Tony was indeed watching an astral projector and not an actual ghost. 

Tony floated back through the wall, not breathing until he was safely hidden behind a solid, opaque barrier. He should really start counting his miracles at this point. 

With renewed caution, Tony resumed his search. He managed to find the library about six times—or maybe six libraries a single time each. He wasn’t sure anymore. This building, and this dimension, was fucking with his head. 

Phasing through another doorway, Tony drifted into a wide, low-ceilinged room. It wasn’t unlike the  _ dozens  _ of others he’d found in color-scheme and atmosphere, but its contents had Tony lingering. Shelves, podiums, display cases of varying upkeep all sat scattered throughout the hardwood tiles and dusty sunbeams. Each contained an object, and each object seemed to glow with power in Tony’s astral eyes. 

He almost didn’t see Strange. Almost didn’t recognize him. 

In the far corner, bathed in shadow and still as stone, the sorcerer stood before a glass case of shimmering reflection. His forehead leaned against the surface. A hand was raised to press against the barrier, and on the other side, a ruby swath of fabric matched the gesture. 

The Cloak.  _ His  _ Cloak. 

Tony drifted closer. 

Strange was thin. More than that—he was downright gaunt, his clothes hanging off a skeletal frame. In his universe. Tony had hardly seen the man without his cosplay tunic and gaping pants. This Strange wore garments not out of place in Tony’s wardrobe. Hell, they wouldn’t be out of place in  _ anyone’s  _ wardrobe; the plain shirt and uniform half-shorts were completely and universally unremarkable. Head bowed, expression hidden, the scars that Tony had only glimpsed shone wetly where Strange’s hand touched the case. 

Tony was hovering next to the man, now. With the height he gained and the almost defeated curl of Strange’s spine, they were just about the same height. It unnerved Tony, far too much.

In the reflection on the glass, Tony could see Strange’s face. 

_ Oh. _

He’d thought this dimension unreflective of the apocalyptic event Loki had spoken of.  He’d thought there nothing wrong with the world they’d be returning to. He’d thought there was no dystopia, no devastation.

He’d been wrong.

“Strange,” he said quietly, words sounding dampened even to his own ears. He knew the sorcerer wouldn’t hear, but that wasn’t truly why he spoke. 

He wondered if he could touch the man, or if his incorporeal form would pass through him without resistance. Thinking it best not to try, Tony just lingered and tried not to look too long at the exhaustion that coated Strange as thick as molasses. 

There was nothing else for him to do, after all. 

Tony knew, perhaps better than anyone else, what giving up looked like. What it felt like. How it pulled on your limbs and on your thoughts and on your determination, on your ability to  _ care.  _ About anything. About your future, your past, your family, your decisions. Yourself. 

He wondered what had happened to strip it all from Strange, in this moment.

And he wondered, unbidden, if it had happened to the Strange from his dimension yet.

“Could you get any more confusing, wizard?” Tony sighed, carding his hands through his hair. “I spend more brain power figuring  _ you _ out than I do the quest.” 

Untrue. He could, perhaps, but Tony… he preferred not to think about either version of the wizard that seemed to exist specifically to push every one of his trauma buttons. It was just easier that way. 

For the first time, Tony felt a stab of guilt about that. 

He waited, standing beside Strange as whatever events were occurring played out in drastic slow motion. For a long while, those events were nothing at all. Just the slow blinking of a tired sorcerer and the subtle twitches of a living Cloak. 

But Tony couldn’t wait forever. 

He studied the sorcerer, trying to figure out how, exactly, he was going to communicate with a separate dimension. As far as he knew, he was completely separate from either of his worlds, stranded in a place just off from where he was supposed to be. But the barriers outside the Sanctum had interacted with him—both times, their power had been consistent.

Magic. As always, it seemed the only answer. And the only magic Tony had access to…

Carefully, Tony unwound his fingers from the Time Gem. It’s wavering power curled over his fingernails. He swallowed, looking between it and the frozen form of his only ticket back home, and his only source of answers, so close and yet so impossibly far away. 

“Sorry about this,” Tony said, and held the Gem out to the skeletal sorcerer.

Immediately, and in painfully slow motion, the sorcerer’s eyes widened. Tony danced backward, folding the Stone back into his grip, as Strange straightened and turned to look at him. It was like watching a cloud move across the sky—too slow to truly perceive its movements, but fast enough that movement was obvious.

So Tony saw when the man suddenly—or as suddenly as was possible at that agonizing speed—threw himself backwards. His eyes closed, his weight overbalancing over his heels, and Tony could see him begin to fall backward. 

He was about to panic about what he’d just presumably caused when the shimmer of another form separated from Strange. Slightly blue and definitely incorporeal, Strange’s astral form met Tony’s eyes without hesitation.

And this time, there was no shock, no awe. Nothing sparked in Strange’s expression, nothing had him watching Tony in hopeful disbelief, nothing. 

Strange just choked on something that sounded far too much like a sob and threw his arms around Tony’s shoulders.

Tony took a step back, unable to respond. He had nothing to say anyway. 

For a moment, it didn’t matter that Tony didn’t know him in the slightest. It didn’t matter that they were two ghostly forms in a reality that didn’t really exist. It didn’t matter that the world was ending some indefinite time in the past and the future. It didn’t matter that all this was decidedly awkward, and even more uncomfortable.

For a moment, Tony was just a guy giving a hug to someone that needed it. 

But that couldn’t last forever, either. 

Strange stepped back after a long moment, a sigh breaking the air between them. Tony sidled backwards as well, resisting the urge to clear his throat, and stuffed his hands into his pockets. He watched as the sorcerer achingly straightened, rolled his shoulders back, and lifted his chin, composing himself in whatever twisted way he had left.

Tony hated that he remembered exactly how that felt.

“Tony,” Strange acknowledged. “Hi.”

“Hi. Uh.” Tony did clear his throat this time. “You look like shit.”

Strange grinned, rueful but true. “Thanks.”

“I’m serious.” Tony gestured to the man with his free hand. “You were already a beanpole, and now you could pass as a stick insect.”

“Hm.” Strange wrapped his arms around himself, a gesture halfway between vulnerability and disinterest. “I’m fine.”

“Uh huh.” Tony raised an eyebrow.

“Could you do anything about it anyway?” 

Tony sighed. “Fair point.”

Strange huffed a laugh. “I’m always right. Remember this; it’ll make everything go  _ so  _ much faster going forward.”

“Nah, bitching with you from the past whenever you say  _ anything  _ is so much more fun.”

“Hopefully I’ve been bitching back.”

“Not lately,” Tony replied honestly. “We haven’t talked much; you just show up and portal us places and then leave again. You’d be a great Uber driver; quick service, anywhere in the universe, and absolutely no unwanted conversation. Or conversation at all!”

Strange smiled, and Tony tried to decide just how self-deprecating it was. “Glad to hear it. Why are you here?”

“What, I can’t just jaunt across two and a half universes to chat with you?” Tony quipped. 

Strange stiffened, a hand flying up to brush behind his ear. “Don’t say that,” he snapped. “ _ Please  _ don’t say that.”

Taken aback, Tony swayed backward. “What?”

“You don’t know Stephen Strange,” the wizard insisted, as quietly forceful as the Gem in Tony’s hand. “You don’t even like him. No, you came here with a purpose; never come here without one. I can help you, Tony, but the jump here is dangerous. Use it wisely.” 

“Okay okay,” Tony said, raising his hands—or, one hand and one fist. “I admit it, I came here with questions.”

Strange nodded curtly, settling back against the wall behind them, somehow not passing through it. His gaze had never once flickered to the image of his physical form, tumbling backward toward the ground, nor to the reflective case containing his Cloak. 

Yeah, Tony had questions. Not all of them he could ask. 

“What happened?” he said, crossing his arms.

Strange quirked his eyebrow. If it wasn’t for the hollowness of his face, he would have looked like the Strange Tony remembered. “Haven’t we already gone over this?”

“Not to you,” Tony clarified. “What happened in general.” He waved his hands around himself in either an indication of the universe or a futile attempt to lift himself off the ground. 

“Ah.”

“If I’m not alive here, I won’t remember.” Tony spoke as the words occurred to him. “I’ll never know—this world isn’t mine.”

“Yet.”

“Yet,” Tony admitted. “But… what happened? What’s the story? Why is Rogers underlined on your stupid list—how did I manage to speak to him in this universe? Why is  _ Peter  _ underlined? What am I supposed to do, what am I supposed to expect—from Thanos, from my team, from myself?”

Strange held up his hands, halting Tony’s tirade before it could ramble on any further. “Slow down, slow down. I’m not… I’m not sure I can answer all those.”

“What?” Tony frowned. “Am I supposed to figure it out as I go? Are you pulling some Dumbledore to protect me from the truth?” 

“No,” Strange assured quickly, “you deserve all the information possible, anything to make your mission easier. I’m happy to provide what I can, but I’m not… I may not be the best person to ask.”

Tony’s frowned deepened. “You don’t know? You can’t tell me what happened to  _ end the world?” _

_ You can’t tell me how I died? _

“I have a lot of memories,” Strange said. “They get jumbled sometimes.”  
There was that veil of truth again; the double meaning that had Tony’s hand clenching around the Gem. 

“Strange.”

“What if I just show you?” 

Tony paused. Strange looked at him, expression halfway between apology and hope. 

“You can do that?”

“Well, I can take you through what the world looks like now.”

Tony snorted, floating backward as he resigned himself to yet more winking as he peered through into this universe. “You tried so hard not to say ‘I can show you the world.’”

Strange grinned. “Well, I can tell you about it too. Tour and a lecture.”

Tony tossed the Gem into the air, catching it again in his fist, and moved after the other astral form. “Lead the way, wizard.”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So it was all gonna be one chapter and then I only got to this point and it was already 2.5k so here we are. Moooaaaar stephen content.
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	77. It Happened in Five Years

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope I handled this well whoOPs
> 
> Enjoy this chap!

 

**Earth-200004/199999, Shared Astral Plane:** **_December/April 2016/2026_ **

 

“We can’t be out long,” Strange said as the two of them slipped out of the Sanctum and onto the frozen New York street. 

“Astral curfew?”

A snort. “No, my physical form is going to hit the ground and cause some noise. I’m not technically supposed to be projecting, nor am I supposed to be in the relic room, so I’d prefer to avoid causing much attention to myself.”

Tony hummed. He poked a random pedestrian’s temple as they passed her on the street, and his finger sunk through up to the knuckle. Tony quickly retreated. 

“Alright, yeah, fair,” Tony sighed, catching up to the brisk movements of Strange’s ghost. “How long does that translate to here?”

“About half an hour until anyone actually hears my fall. Longer until they actually make it to the relic room to see what the problem is.”

“So…”

“About an hour and a half.”

“Great.” Tony reached out toward another unfortunate person.

“Hands to yourself,” Strange called without so much as turning around. 

Tony slunk away with the air of a reprimanded child. “Okay, okay…” 

The wizard glanced at him, and if Tony didn’t know better, he might have called the smile Strange offered fond. Affectionate, even.

He scowled to ward it off.

“What do you want to know?” Strange asked. “Or rather, where do you want to start?”

“At the beginning. Who’s this Thanos guy?”

“Thanos was a cosmic superpower,” Strange answered. They were flying now, racing at impossible speeds low over the New York streets. “He pillaged planets, one by one, halfway to genocide on each. That was his goal, see, to wipe out fifty percent of all life in the universe.”

“Why? What twisted logic justified  _ that  _ terrifying story?”

“Overpopulation,” Strange replied grimly. “‘If life continues unchecked, then life will cease to exist.’”  
“Then why not—”

“Use the Stones to create more resources? To show people the truth of what they’re doing, the unsustainability of it? Provide solutions to land and resource use so the population doesn’t boom and force another snap?” Strange shrugged. “Bad guy.”

“Did he monologue?”

“Is that a question? There was  _ so much monologuing.” _

“What was the best one?”

“He had this great line about life just fading away, calling it mercy.”

Tony grinned. “What was  _ my  _ best line?”

Rolling his eyes, Strange drifted a little faster. They were curling up into upstate New York now, but not back toward the Compound. Instead, they moved along a winding two-lane highway, mostly farmland and lumber yards, and Strange took each turn like he’d done it a thousand times.

“Always asking the important questions,” Strange chuckled, looking over his shoulder at Tony.

“Damn right,” Tony agreed. 

“You’re best line, hm. That’s a hard one.”

“Too many to choose from?”

Strange huffed. “More like trying to find  _ any  _ that are actually clever.”

“Wounded. I’m wounded, wizard.”

“Uh-huh. As if anything I could say would so much as dent your confidence in your own one-liners.”

“I take creative criticism! Honest.” Tony offered his best innocent grin. He’d been taking notes from Parker. 

Ignoring him, Strange opted to answer the first question. “Best line probably goes to ‘He means get lost, Squidward.’”

“What?” Tony barked. “Thanos looks like Squidward? God, kill him now, kill him with  _ fire.” _

Strange grinned. “Not Thanos. One of his ‘children.’ Ebony Maw came to make trouble on Earth, which is how we learned about Thanos’s invasion. Well technically we learned it after the Hulk crashed through the roof of our Sanctum, but—”

“Wait wait.” Tony moved in front of Strange, forcing him to stop.  _ “Bruce?” _

“Yeah,” Strange hummed. “You’re friend’s probably in space at the moment still, if you’re in 2016.”

“Almost 2017 now,” Tony corrected absently, mind still racing to catch up with the fact that they’d  _ found Bruce. _

“Right. So Bruce comes breaking in through the Seal of the Vishanti. Big mess. He tells us to get you, we do, I congratulate you, then we haul you into the Sanctum and start explaining Infinity Stones—”

“Wait, wait,” Tony said again. “Congratulate me on what?”

Strange opened his mouth. Then closed it again. Then opened it, one more time, saying, “er, I’ll get to that. I promise.”

“Okay…” Tony fell silent, content to listen. 

“That’s when the Maw arrived; he and his siblings came searching for the Stones. We fought. I got taken.”

“Shit,” Tony observed. 

“Yeah, it wasn’t fun. But you came after me, and Peter—”

“Wait,  _ Peter was there?”  _

“You tried to stop him, like I said before,” Strange explained, “but he stayed. Something about loyalty and great power coming with responsibility or something.”

Tony rubbed his incorporeal eyes with nonexistent hands. “Oh my god.” 

“So we end up in space,” Strange continued, “and Peter saves both our asses, and you decide that it’s better to fight Thanos on his own turf. So we head to T-Titan.” There was a slight waver on the last word.

“This… I think I may have dreamed about this,” Tony admitted. “You from the past said that was a thing.”

“Yes, it’s not surprising. They’re memories of the future; perfectly not confusing.”

“Right.” Tony chuckled ruefully. “Anyway, Titan.”

Strange continued, “yes, Titan. We land there—if you can call it that—and we meet some space pirates.”

_ “Hold up.” _

“They were good space pirates. Dumbasses, but good.”

“Let me guess, we fought with them.”

Strange nodded. “Yeah. This is… this is where things start to get fuzzy.”

“Too much happening.”  
Closing his eyes, Strange nodded. “Far, far too much.”

“Tell me what you can, then,” Tony said obligingly. 

“Right.” A deep breath on the wizard’s part. “Well… we fought. We lost.”

“And I died,” Tony inferred.

Strange shook his head. “No. He was going to kill you. But I… I gave up the Stone. In exchange for your life.”

Tony froze.

Strange had traveled at least fifty feet before he realized Tony was no longer following him at top speed. Tony stared at him as he stopped, turning to look back at the engineer. Tony couldn’t see his expression.

_ “What?”  _ Tony finally demanded. 

Moving back to him, Strange clasped his hands together with a sigh. “It was the only way. I… I saw the future. Lots of futures. And you needed to live.”

“I…” Tony blinked, a vivid sense of nausea stabbing through his abdomen as he imagined a bloody Strange casting the Time Stone to Thanos’s waiting hands. 

“There was no other way,” Strange said quietly, and it sounded like a plea.

“Did we stop him before he could get the other Stones? How did we possibly kill him…”

“We… we were still on Titan when he got the final Stone. The Mind Stone.”

_ Vision.  _ Tony swallowed hard. 

“The unlucky—or maybe the lucky—50 percent turned to dust when Thanos snapped,” Strange murmured. “I don’t remember—I think I went first. Or maybe it was the Mantis girl.” Strange’s expression was far away, and Tony had to lean close to hear the words. “Most times I went first. It was only fair, after all.”

_ Fair? _

“But it took Quill. And Drax and Mantis. It took me.” 

And suddenly, Tony was drifting back again, fingers coming up to clutch his wrist. “Don’t say it,” he breathed. “Don’t you dare.”

Strange looked at him, face twisted with enough apology and self-loathing that Tony could do nothing but try and prepare himself.

“It took Peter last,” Strange said. “He felt it, in his spider-sense. It must have hurt, more than anything.”

Tony felt his astral form plummeting, felt his stomach rise and his mind jar to a sudden and painful stop, and he was blinking away light, blinking away the image of dust on his hands and the fading echo of terrified words— _ I don’t want to go, please, I don’t want— _

“Stark.”

Tony jerked his gaze back to the wizard, shaking away the dust. “You gave up the Stone? And we lost? God, I must’ve hated you.”

“I don’t think you did,” Strange assured, and it was so obviously a lie that Tony let out a bark of a laugh. 

“Sure.”

Strange cleared his throat. “You weren’t alone. Nebula was there—you got back to Earth together, somehow. I’m not sure on the details of that part, though I think it took a while. That’s the biggest gamble I made; you died quite often on that stranded ship’s journey.”

Tony grunted. Listening closely to Strange’s words, he focused on their blurring surroundings as they traveled and tried to process. 

“I don’t… I don’t remember… most times you met Rogers and the rest when you got back? And then you… no, that’s not what happened. I think you monologue a bit. ‘I never called because you said to do it if I needed you, and I never—’ no, that’s not right either.” The wizard’s voice was running together at the edges, almost frantic.

“Strange.”

“‘We’d do that together, too. Guess what; we lost, and you weren’t there.’ That might be the one? I’m sorry.”

“It’s… it’s alright,” Tony said hesitantly, not precisely sure what was going on. “I asked for a summary, not a full recitation.”

“And I said ‘all the information’,” Strange replied. 

Tony waved away the stubborn quip. “So I roasted Rogers; why did you decide to make him so important in our second chance here?”

“Because you snipped at each other for a while, but then you agreed to work together, after you got better. And off to find Thanos you went; everyone in that damned spaceship again, following Rocket and Nebula.”

“‘Everyone?’”

“Everyone who was left,” Stephen clarified. 

Carefully, Tony voiced, “was… was Pepper…”

“Pepper wasn’t dusted.”

“Thank God for small mercies, then. Rhodey?”

“Alive.”

Tony nodded. “Sorry. Off to find Thanos?”

“Yes. But you found that he’d destroyed the Stones—the very power surge the half-dozen of you used to find him was the surge of power of him using the Stones to destroy them. I assume you panicked, disbelieving. You pinned him down; Nebula distracted him. Thor swung the final blow.”

“Shit,” Tony breathed. 

“Or maybe it was Carol that pinned him,” Strange mused, ignoring him. “Don’t quote me on that. You might not have been there. There are a lot of versions of that fight. Anyway, Thanos dead, but still having won, everyone returned to Earth, to clean up the best they could. For five years.”

_ “Five years?”  _ Tony squeaked. 

“Yes.”

“Oh...kay.”

He tried to imagine a world stripped of half its people surviving for five years. He tried to imagine  _ himself  _ surviving it. What about those relying on the ones who disappeared—putting their lives in those people’s hands in whatever way society had necessitated? How many more had died, outside Thanos’s half? 

Tony could see the dystopia, now.

“How did we fix it?” Tony demanded. They had to have fixed it—Strange had said Peter was alive. And narrative Tony hadn’t kicked the bucket  _ yet.  _

“Time travel.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “What.”

“The Time Stone had been destroyed,” Strange began, gesticulating slightly, “or at least, so everyone thought. I had to mess with that a little, but that’s not important. Um. But after Scott Lang came back from the Quantum Realm, you were able to engineer a fully-functioning time-space… compass, I suppose.”

“I… was?”

“Yes,” Strange hummed. “There’s nothing you can’t do, you know. When you put your mind to it.”

“As weirdly flattering as that may be,” Tony said, “how did that help us? Wouldn’t we have split the timeline going back and killing Thanos or taking the Stones or whatever?”

“Your plan was not to cause a disturbance,” Strange said. “But it didn’t work out that way. You didn’t cause long-lasting damage to more than four alternate timelines, I don’t think.”

“Oh. Uh… good?”

“Not good. I’m going to have to deal with them when they inevitably spiral into uncontrollable half-facets of a 4D multiverse later. Me from that specific split, of course.”

“Ah.” Tony pretended like he’d understood that. “Of course.”

Strange gave him a knowing look and continued. “So, lets just say you got the Stones. But you also got Thanos, who followed you out through your time machine by impersonating one of your team members. That part always occurred, no matter what other events led up to it. But you succeeded in getting the Stones, and in snapping your fingers to bring us all back. I came back knowing what needed to happen, so I was able to get us all to the remains of the Compound to help you fight Thanos’s invading army.”

Tony snorted. “I bet that entrance was just  _ spectacular.” _

“It was iconic, if I do say so myself. Rogers even said ‘Avengers Assemble’ while holding Mjolnir so—”

“Wait,  _ back up.” _

Strange raised his eyebrows. “Yeah, Rogers is worthy, keep up.”

_ “What the fu—” _

“So we fought,” Strange continued, cutting Tony off before he could so much as  _ begin  _ to process that little gem of information. “You spoke maybe… twenty words to me. And then everything went to shit.”

Tony sighed. “Of course it did.”

“Thanos destroyed your only way of returning the Stones to their rightful places in the universe. No one could keep him away from them, not for long—it was as he said.”

“He was inevitable,” Tony whispered.

“Yes,” Strange murmured. “Do you know what happened next?”

“I can guess.” Tony rubbed at his hand, feeling the tingle of the Gem as its far-too-familiar power pulsed particularly strongly.

“Thanos couldn’t snap. Not if you snapped first.”

The silence that hung after Strange’s words was eerie, as eerie as this frozen world that they trotted through. Tony watched the information float by across the screen of his mind, and promptly shoved it into the nearest cardboard box, because  _ fuck,  _ he did not have the brain power to think about that right now. He didn’t have the brainpower to think about that  _ ever. _

“Yeah,” Strange said quietly. “I killed you.”

Tony stopped. “Okay,  _ back up the truck,  _ Strange. That’s not what happened  _ at all.” _

“I chose the future,” Strange insisted. “I orchestrated it. Like a puppet master with his twisted marionette—I played with your life. I  _ took it  _ from you. And I’m sorry. Please—you have to believe that, I’m  _ sorry—” _

“Stop it!” Tony hissed, and Strange’s voice strangled into silence. “I have enough to think about without you blaming it all on yourself, alright? Just—just stop. I’m not dead yet; there’s nothing to forgive you for.”   

Strange just stared at him, that icey control back across his expression.

Tony wanted to slap him.

Instead, he moved forward again, accelerating along the twists of the little highway. Strange took the lead again, his throat bobbing as he swallowed and continued on their way. 

“Any—any other questions, then?”

“Not yet,” Tony said. “I need… I need just a second. To process all that.” 

“Fair.” Strange nodded, slowing before a small driveway that turned off the road they were following. It was well-driven and slightly damp from rain, circling the lake they’d just passed. There was a mailbox by where Strange was floating, and a hummingbird feeder caught between its swinging in the wind. 

Expecting the wizard to continue forward, Tony drifted further down the road, but Strange turned into the cozy little driveway. Tony frowned at him.

“Uh, wizard. Where are you going?”

Strange paused, expression unreadable. Then he pointed up the driveway.

“A lot can happen in five years,” Strange said.

A bit nervous, Tony followed the wizard up the driveway and down toward the quaint house and garage at the base of it. He saw a car parked halfway up the little road—a car he recognized.

“That’s… my car,” Tony observed, speeding to catch up with Strange.

“Of course.”

“What  _ is  _ this place?”

Strange smiled at him with so many layers Tony gave up trying to decode a single one. Instead, he followed Strange’s hand has he pointed, shaking hand extended to indicate the person in the garden, the one Tony hadn’t seen. 

A woman knelt in the vegetable beds, one hand extended in a wave at something Tony couldn’t see. Her blonde hair was tangled in a ratty ponytail, dirt dusted across her face, expression caught in a sigh of effort as she worked whatever project she hand embarked upon. A chicken pecked at one of her hands, 

Pepper Potts. 

“That day in the park, when Thanos came,” Strange began, “I congratulated you on a wedding.”  
Tony’s hands flew to his mouth, catching whatever disbelief, whatever awe, whatever _joy_ was about to pour from between them. “Oh my God,” he whispered.

“Come on,” Strange said, beckoning him forward. 

“That’s… this is my house. I… lived here. For five years. With  _ Pepper.” _

“Come  _ on,  _ Stark,” Strange urged, pulling him back into motion. “You haven’t seen the half of it.”

Even as he was forced into movement, Tony couldn’t tear his eyes away from Pepper—Pepper  _ Stark,  _ the woman of his dreams, the woman who’d left him over Iron Man, the woman who’d come back. His wife.  _ He’d married her,  _ in this universe, proposed to her long before Thanos. 

When? Where?  _ How? _

How had he fucked up so badly in his own timeline?

This was his home. And standing there, in the garden, was Tony’s wife.

He couldn’t take his eyes off her. 

They rounded the side of the house. He could still sense Pepper’s closeness, even as another form drew his eye. And every thought evaporated from Tony’s mind. 

There was a girl. 

There was a girl, sitting on top of an old doghouse, her hands spread wide as she reached toward the treetops above her. In one was clutched a mouse, dirty and painted with a toddler’s vision of flowers. She looked about seven, with a smile still gappy with missing teeth, and a chubby face and body that was just beginning to grow out into something small and lithe and beautiful. 

Hair the same deep russet as Tony’s curled around her face. Eyes the same amber brown crinkled with the same glint of clever wit. Shoulders with the same slope rolled back and down in a confident and devil-may-care demeanor . 

Tony  _ ran.  _

He didn’t care if he looked ridiculous, sprinting above a ground that didn’t react to his weight. He didn’t care if he stopped half-melded with the doghouse. He didn’t care if he dropped the Gem on his way, hardly even sparing it a thought, didn’t care how frozen the scene was, how separate he had become from it. 

Because with a perfect, unbroken clarity, Tony knew. 

Morgan. Morgan Stark, his daughter, his star and legacy and everything that was bright and good in this world,  _ everything.  _ His Morgoona, whom he loved more than anything in this universe. His little girl.

“Morgan,” Tony breathed, and it was part sob, part laugh, and part something unquantifiable and perfect because this, this right here, was home. He reached out to touch her, to hug her, to brush that thick lock of silken hair out of her mouth, to kiss her forehead and never let her go again, in case he missed a single moment of her golden existence.

And his hand passed right through her.

Tony came down to earth with a bump and a splatter and a choking noise that felt like sandpaper coming up out of his throat. He felt like someone had just socked him in the gut, then roundhouse-kicked his temple to finish the job. 

He was dead. He was dead, and he hadn’t even met this girl—his perfect daffodil girl—in any of his dark and long and empty years. He’d died and left her to grow up on her own. He’d died and was  _ missing it.  _

Tony reached out again. His hand didn’t so much as slow where her form was supposed to be. 

He tried again.

And again. 

And again. 

Then he looked toward the only other person who might possibly understand, might possibly be able to see him, and screamed. 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember when I said this was gonna be one chapter? Well, it decided to be three...


	78. An Influx of Information

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi all! I hope to get to those comments on the last chapter real soon. But bee patient with me, lol; we're moving and the weather decided to snow 3 feet so there's a bit of Busy on this side of the computer screen :D
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

 

 

**Earth-200004/199999, Shared Astral Plane:** **_December/April 2016/2026_ **

“Stark!” Stange’s voice eventually filtered through Tony’s one-track thought process, eventually convinced him to stumble back, move away from Morgan’s form. His howl, his shuddering cry of grief and denial and confusion, curled off into a whimper as he tore his gaze away from his daughter’s frozen face. 

“Why did you bring me here?” he choked, turning his desperation toward his sorcerer guide.

“You asked,” Strange murmured. “I thought… I thought seeing her would make you happy.”

It did. Seeing her would always make him happy, in some isolated part of his mind that was crafted by her, only for her. Some cavernous emptiness in his soul, torn open six weeks ago, was stitching closed. It left another chasm in its wake. 

“I remember her.” Tony reached out again, almost on instinct, but schooled his hand back to his side. “I don’t remember what… but I  _ remember.” _

He remembered what her voice sounded like, but none of the words she might have said. He remembered that he was proud of her, but not what for. He remembered that she liked to laugh, but not the things she found funny. The emotions were there, the understanding, but not the memories themselves.

How was it possible that she could feel so right and so terribly wrong at the same time?

“This is your home,” Strange said. “This dimension. You can feel the connections you had—they stretch through the chaining of the realities.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” Tony snapped. He tore himself backward, finding his way back to where Strange hovered. 

They were silent, for a long while. A ghostly guide and a phantom father, trapped against this photograph of the universe. Tony wanted to rake his fingers over his scalp and feel blood, wanted to break something, touch something, ground himself somewhere in this phasing universe. He didn’t know where he belonged anymore.

“Well, so,” Strange finally said, gaze flicking to Tony and then quickly away, “do you want… the rest of the story now?”

“I’m dead.” Tony closed his eyes. “Isn’t that the end of the story?”

“And yet you’re standing  _ right here next to me.”  _ There was the flicker of awe, of joy, trickling in to pool at the base of Strange’s words and  _ fuck it, w _ asn’t this confusing enough already? “Does it really sound like the end of the story?”

“Alright,” Tony managed. “Just try not to strangle me with all the rugs you keep pulling out from under me.”

“I can’t promise that,” Strange sighed, jerking back into motion. He must have gripped the Gem upon Tony’s dropping of it, and he pressed it back into the engineer’s fist before leading a reluctant Tony away from the doghouse and around the side by the lake. He took him onto the porch. And then, with a glance back at his follower, into the house. 

Tony didn’t let himself watch the walls, the floor, the contents of the building he’d built his life in. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to leave again, if he did. But he felt it, the atmosphere, pressing down on his astral body, and it was homey and comfortable and known. This was a loved house, a used house, occupied for years and almost decades. Tony felt nauseous. 

At the door of the kitchen, Strange stepped aside. Nervous—no,  _ terrified— _ Tony glanced into the room. 

There was someone inside. 

There was someone inside, up to his elbows in the dirty dishwater, a somewhat frumpy apron tied in a neat bow around his middle. He was frowning as he concentrated, one hand swiping down the length of a pan—one Tony recognized—and there were a few bubbles that clung to his spiky ebony hair. There was something friendly about him, something free, like his dark skin and honest eyes were the feathers of something ready to take to the sky. Built large, he moved lithely, and Tony saw, with every breath the man took, that he belonged here, too.

“So that’s what he’s like,” Strange murmured beside him.

“What?” Tony turned his gaze to his companion. 

“I haven’t actually been here. Not in a long… in a long time. But I knew—everyone knew. I probably wouldn’t have if Peter hadn’t told me, but—”

“Strange.”  
“Right, focusing.” Strange blinked thrice, rapidly, and shook his head. “This is Unathi D’Kash. Former agent of Wakanda, now a postman and an architect. And Pepper Stark’s fiance.”

Tony’s vision blurred momentarily, and the physical whiplash those words gave him—slapped him across the face with—sent him stumbling slightly.  _ “What?”  _ he choked. 

He’d just—he’d just been told he had her. That he’d found a life, a home, the legacy he truly wanted to leave. He’d found what he wanted to be remembered for, with the  _ love of his life,  _ and he’d realized it not two minutes ago. And now, standing in a tiled doorway, it was falling out from beneath his fingers. Strange dangled the knowledge before him, then snatched it away just as quickly, and Tony was left grasping at empty air. Choking on it.

“A lot can change in five years. A lot can change in three; you’ve been gone… you’ve been gone a long time.”

“Three years.” Tony turned the words over in his mouth, tasting them. He’d stepped away from this.  _ Snapped  _ himself away from this. If his girl… she must have been four, maybe five, when he’d apparently bent the laws of space and time. She’d be seven now. Eight. Even if he managed to succeed with Strange’s dimension-spanning scheme, he’d have missed  _ years  _ of Morgan’s life. 

In front of him, a foreign, peaceful man washed his daughter’s dishes. 

Tony’d lost Pepper before he’d even held her. 

“Why did I…” Tony swallowed. “Why did I step away from this?  _ How could I  _ step away from this?”

“Fifty-percent of all life, Tony. All life in the  _ universe.  _ How could you not?” Strange put emphasis on the pronoun; how could  _ Tony  _ not step away. Not just anyone— _ you. _

“I put the universe before Morgan,” Tony murmured.

“No.” Strange shook his head. Tony saw the movement in his peripheral vision. “You put the universe before yourself. You didn’t do this in spite of your family, you did it  _ for  _ them.”

Tony shook his head. He watched the slow movements of Unathi, easy and true, in a place he might have filled. A role Tony had vacated. The man was more than a replacement, more than a fallback, he was the bastard that could keep what Tony had given up.

“How do you know?” Tony snapped, glaring at Strange—glaring anywhere but at the Wakandan at the washbasin. “How could you  _ possibly  _ know? You were dead, hours after you met me. You talk like you’ve been in my head, like you  _ care  _ about me. I  _ let  _ people know me. I let people care. And I wouldn’t have chosen you. I may not remember this story, but I do know my character, and I wouldn’t have let you in. You know  _ nothing.”  _ Tony was snarling, hurling all the confusion and conflict and  _ pain  _ swirling in his chest out toward the wizard before him. 

And Strange met his eyes with an emotion so deep and cold that it sent Tony stepping back. 

“Fourteen million, six hundred and five.” The words were sharp, edged with disgust—though not toward Tony.

“Fourteen million  _ whats?”  _ Tony demanded.  

“Those are the lifetimes I lived in a single moment.”

“So what? The number of times it took you to realize I needed to die?” 

Strange laughed, brittle and shattered. “Yes, Stark. I needed fourteen million lifetimes to see the  _ fucking  _ pattern. Fourteen million, six hundred and five to accept it.”

Time Gem leaving an imprint against his palm, Tony’s hands fisted in front of him. They were shaking. With rage, with fear, with confusion, Tony didn’t know—he wanted to grip something, anything, to  _ touch  _ and  _ feel something  _ besides this yawning emptiness and the flashing of astral lightning and the asphyxiating knowledge that he didn’t belong here, that he was dead, that nothing could fix these mistakes he had no choice but to make. He wanted to know there was something else here, not just the existential  _ Doubt  _ and  _ Fear  _ and  _ Void  _ and  _ Time  _ that had wrapped its talons around his destiny, never to release him, and he wanted to reach out and know there was breath, wanted to reach out and know there was blood, wanted to reach out and feel more than the claws of a clicking scarab on the inside of his skull.

So he did. 

Tony reached for the only thing he could, hand tightening in a desperate, vice-like hold around Stephen Strange’s fingers. His eyes weren’t closed, but he could see the sparking lightning even still. He was floating in nothingness, nowhere was physical, nowhere was  _ real  _ but that single point of contact with something outside himself. Tony grasped it. Focused on it with everything he had. 

_ Dead, dead, gone, where’s home, I want to see I want to breathe I want to scream— _

“St—… eath—… ony!”

That voice? He knew that voice, from too many places. It was impossible. It came from here, and here was not home, he wanted to go home, he wanted to get away from that voice but he couldn’t let go of the hand, couldn’t be alone here.  

_ Stop. Stop! _

“Are you—… me?”

There was ringing in his ears, scratching in his skull,  _ get it out get it out get it out— _

Something slapped him. Hard. 

“Anthony Edward Stark, open your goddamn eyes and  _ take a breath. _ Maybe even two. I’m breathing; you have to breathe too. It’s basic logic. Do it for consistency's sake.”

“What… are you talking about—” Tony rasped. He had no physical body to feel the sting of Strange’s somewhat weak blow, but he remembered the echo of sensation. 

“You, doing your duty as a living organism,” Strange hissed. “Seriously, you have  _ one job.” _

“And… what’s that… then?”

“Respirating. Allowing the unconscious contraction of the diaphragm muscles.”

He had no muscles, no body, no form—only consciousness. Could he even breathe? What was Strange asking for in this world of phantom lights and eerie echoes. Was it even possible to do as he was ordered? There was  _ nothing here— _

“I should have—Vishanti, I shouldn’t have let it get this far. I’m sending you back.”

Vaguely, he realized his hold might be painful on those scared digits. But as he tried to shift his hand away, to focus on something else, the doctor snuck his own back within Tony’s grip.

“Back?” Tony choked out. “I still have… questions—”

“None that I can answer. Brace yourself, firefly.”

Tony held tighter.  “No,  _ wait—” _

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

In a jarring  _ strike  _ of power, Tony slammed back through the dimension, leaving the realm of light behind and gasping a terrified breath of his dusty workshop air. Like icicles beneath hot sunlight, the lightning behind his eyelids disappeared. Sensation flooded back to him: cold tile and changing sounds and an environment that was moving at the same speed as him. He matched. He belonged. The influx of information chased the scarab out of his mind. 

He opened his eyes with a moan. The sharp return to his physical form sent his vision spinning and his hands shooting out for balance. Stiff fingers uncurled from around the Time Gem. It fell against the Compound floor with two quiet pings, its aura disappearing almost as sharply as Tony’s own had manifested. 

 And looming above him, like an astonishingly pale vulture, was  _ another  _ Doctor Strange. It took all of Tony’s self control not to strike out at what his instincts interpreted as a threat.

_ God damn it.  _

“Stark,” the man was saying, “can you hear me?”

“Regrettably, I can,” Tony grumbled. He scooched out of the sorcerer’s shadow. “What are you doing here?”

“I was invited.” 

FRIDAY chimed in as Tony climbed to his feet. “You were out for two and a half minutes, boss. I called who I thought was necessary.”

“When I ordered that, the wizard was not included.”

“Why not? You were jumping dimensions with the intention of speaking to him. Additionally, he is the only one with the skill set that could potentially overcome the issue of you not waking up.”

“When did the wizard even get added to the database?” Tony demanded.

“The  _ sorcerer  _ is, in fact, still here,” Strange said pointedly. Tony’s gaze swiveled to him as he moved back to perched on the edge of the closest flat surface—which just so happened to be DUM-E’s base. 

The bot’s arm swung over to poke questioningly at the not-Tony that had acclimated himself to its presence, and Strange jumped practically to the ceiling. Tony held in a laugh as the wizard whirled to face DUM-E. His hands flashed up into some complex defensive stance, and DUM-E beeped cheerfully, lowering its arm to poke at Strange’s shoulder again.

The Cloak, which had been acting rather lethargic so far, rippled at the contact. It raised a curious corner and wrapped around the hinge of DUM-E’s hook, flapping at the groves and protrusions. DUM-E recoiled in surprise, bringing the Cloak with it. The fabric slid over Strange’s shoulders and covered his face and head, muffling his curse. Tony couldn’t contain a snort as the man untangled himself from his relic with bemusement, watching as the Cloak flapped around DUM-E’s rotating arm. The bot was beeping repeatedly, its special warning beep, and Tony stood up with the intent to calm it down.

But the Cloak let go after a moment, hovering underneath the bot and flapping excitedly. It swiveled to regard Strange, then pointed aggressively at DUM-E.

“I know,” Strange said. “Did you make a friend?”

The Cloak flapped. 

“No it isn’t magic. Stark made it.”

Another flap.

“No, it isn’t the same thing. It’s  _ very different.” _

Tony chuckled, seizing the implied communication there. “Ha, see, your cape knows what’s up.” He addressed the Cloak. “Yes, DUM-E is magic. You will treat him as such.”

The Cloak fluttered, collars slanting up to observe DUM-E’s now slightly less concerned beeping. The bot’s hook prodded at the Cloak’s shiny clasps, which clinked upon the connection, and DUM-E let out a cheerful whir. It repeated the movement. 

Tony and Strange watched the exchange with identical expressions of fond confusion, before Strange glanced back at Tony and dissimulated behind his usual stony frown. Tony rolled his eyes. He’d just spent an uncharted amount of time watching future Strange fight to keep that same expression, and he knew  _ precisely  _ how fake it was. But the wizard still managed to convince Tony that he had nothing but control over himself and anything around him. 

_ Not this time, Strange. _

“The animate objects being rather amusing is not going to get you out of answering what the hell you thought you were doing, Stark,” Strange drawled.

Tony huffed. “I was gathering information. Answers. Getting to know what we’re in for, and what we’re gonna return to.”  _ What I will have lost.  _

“By casually jaunting across the multiverse? No.”

“But how about yes!”

Strange’s hands twitched. “That’s all fine and good; I don’t give a shit about anyone using their resources to further our demented little quest. But you used the Time Gem, without training, without precision.  _ Again.” _

“Okay, to be fair, the first time was an accident.”  
“Nuance,” Strange snapped. “The point is I felt it. I felt the energy change as you shoved yourself out of _space-time._ Do you think I was the only one? Do you think someone—or something—else might join me in responding here, next time?”

Tony sighed, picking up a stray screwdriver and jabbing it against his knee. “Alright, alright, I see your point. But still. This was a necessary risk.”

“Oh really?” Strange crossed his legs. “What did you find out?”

_ That you from the future is a mess. That I have a family which I subsequently abandoned. That the girl of my dreams is engaged to someone else in a universe I was brave enough to actually pursue her. That I have a daughter. That I have a seven-year-old daughter and I missed her going to school, growing up. I have a daughter and she isn’t here now. _

Tony shrugged. “How Thanos beat us the first time. How not to let him do the same this time.”

“Spill.”

Tony glowered, chucking the screwdriver at the sorcerer. The infuriating man snatched it out of the air without looking up, though it rolled out of his weak grip and nestled against his forearm. 

Tony watched the clumsy yet deliberate movements of Strange’s trembling fingers and frowned. He wondered what had happened to cause them, why his one-size-fits-all magic remedy didn’t work to heal the scars. He wondered if they hurt. 

Sensing his gaze, Strange tucked his hands into his sleeves without so much of a flicker of his expression. Tony looked away. He didn’t have the brainpower for this, not after the heartache that was slowly creeping up his throat, the emotional fatigue of the last moments, the residual adrenaline from his anxiety attack. 

Another in front of Strange, who’d reacted each time in two very different ways.

God, what  _ time  _ was it? Tony could feel weariness in the very marrow of his bones, pooling in his scapulas and his pelvis and his skull. There was so much he needed to process, so many cardboard boxes he needed to pack neatly and file away, file away beside injury and death and pain and confusion from years and years of his life. Tucked away, it couldn’t harm him. Tucked away, it couldn’t draw his focus away from what needed to be done. 

_ There is the next mission. Nothing else. _

“I can’t—I’m not going to talk about this now,” Tony said definitively. “I’ll give the team an update the next time we’re all together.”

Strange muttered something under his breath that Tony didn’t catch, but didn’t care enough to decode. 

“What was that?” Tony wondered tiredly.

“I said of course,” Strange repeated, and Tony would sell his lab to DUM-E if those had been his original words. “Update me when you feel it’s appropriate.”

There was a bitterness behind the words, but before Tony could pursue it, Strange was standing and putting a hand on his Cloak. Reluctantly, the garment drifted away from DUM-E, who let out a long, disappointed beep, and swung over the wizard’s shoulders. Strange might have glanced at Tony. He wasn’t sure. Without another word, he stalked from the lab, leaving Tony confused, unnerved, and alone.

As soon as he’d disappeared, the genius slumped against the table. He concentrated on his breathing, on keeping it level, and closed his eyes. There was no lightning behind his eyelids. He focused on that, gradually feeling more and more  _ okay,  _ more and more like he was going to survive this confusion. 

When FRIDAY spoke, it was hesitant. “You didn’t thank him, boss,” she observed.

“No, I didn’t,” Tony agreed. “It wasn’t as if he did anything.”

FRIDAY didn’t pursue the subject, instead saying, “your heart rate is rather high. And your adrenaline is elevated.”

“Yeah, I’m not surprised.” Tony cradled his head in his hands. “The future is a weird place.”

“How can I help?”

_ Pepper, Morgan, Unathi, Strange, Peter… _

“You, FRI my girl, can turn on the lights in the hallway.” Tony stood up, moving slowly toward the exit. “I’m going to bed.”

FRIDAY flashed the lights, and Tony knew that meant a smile. “I think that’s a good idea, boss,” his AI said. “A very good idea indeed.” 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tony be nice to the wizard he has just as many issues as you and is too stubborn to show you. :(
> 
> Thankful for all of you. <3000


	79. What Friends are For

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The plot: *requires a simple conversation between characters A and B and characters B and C*  
> Me: *takes 5200 words to get it done*
> 
> I suppose you aren't gonna burn me at the stake or anything. Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Peter, MJ, and Ned left the school in one flock of overwhelmed teenage energy as the Friday afternoon sky dumped soggy slush across their winter clothes. The week had been long, full of studying, testing, scheduling, and the reminder—for Peter—that being a superhero didn’t get you out of finals week.

“Auuuuggghhh,” Peter whined, his feet sloshing inside his boots. His best efforts had done nothing to keep his socks dry as the day went on. “This  _ sucks.  _ Are we sure I can’t just drop? I’ll be going to space in a month anyway.”

“We are very sure,” MJ said without the slightest hint of sympathy. “You’re stuck in this with the rest of us.”

“Untrue. You could all drop too.”

His friends gave him twin looks of unimpressed amusement, and Peter flushed. “Okay, fine. But still. Spidering and schooling are becoming mutually exclusive.”

“Nah, you’re just becoming a wimp,” MJ said. “I have absolutely no doubt that you can pull this off. You’ve been doing it for a month.”

“Thank you, as always, for your compliment and insult indeterminately wound together,” Peter sighed. MJ grinned at him. 

They turned down toward the subway, doing their best to duck under the dripping gutters of the overwalks above them. His feet were cold enough; Peter didn’t need the ice dripping down his neck to go with it. Despite the cold, the bustle of the city hadn’t quieted. It just screeched and honked and chattered in a different way, with less people and more pigeons taking up space on the street. 

“Just think,” Ned said. “We get through Monday of testing and then _wham;_ winter break! Two and a half weeks!”  
“Thank God,” MJ agreed.

“And then, with all luck, we won’t even have to come back.” Ned skipped over a puddle and skidded around the corner of the subway station, leading them up the stairs. “Because, and say it with me…”

“We’ll be in Wakanda!” 

The three let out a shared whoop, and Peter grinned, stuffing his hands into his pockets. People gave them side-eyed glares for their loudness, but no one payed a group of teenagers much thought at 3:00. 

“I think it’ll work out,” MJ said with a gleaming edge of hopefulness. “Finally. I’m getting out of here.”

Peter had told them what Tony had offered Monday night, and was greeted with quite a lot of hissing. But he’d explained as well as he could that it wasn’t really  _ Mr. Stark  _ offering them money, no; it was the Stark Industries education and outreach department. This wasn’t about being ‘friends of Spider-Man’ (which Ned had immediately adopted into an acronym), this was about being the first exchange venture through Wakandan borders. 

Which, despite everyone’s best attempts, was starting to get out. T’Challa had approved the legislation, which meant MJ had begun the credit transfer mechanics with the school, which meant that people, inevitably,  _ knew.  _ Tony had promised them he’d keep away most of the reporting, and had even offered to flush the whole thing through the company so they could remain anonymous, but MJ had refused. This was  _ her  _ dream, and though she appreciated the help, she wanted to see it through. 

Peter looked sideways at the girl as they waited for the train, a bit of a frown tugging at his mouth. He still hadn’t asked why she wanted this so badly. Besides the obvious, of course; Wakanda was the most amazing place anyone could dream of studying abroad at. But MJ didn’t just want to go to Wakanda. She wanted to leave New York.

And Peter wanted to know why. Beyond that, he wanted to fix it. 

He knew exactly what it was like to be stuck in a place that had alienated you. What it felt like to call nowhere home, but to have nowhere else to go. He knew what it could drive you to. And he wouldn’t wish it on anyone, especially not this carmel-and-pepper girl who knew so much and offered even more. 

“Thanks,” he said suddenly. “Y’know, for working this out.”

Ned nodded emphatically. “Yeah, we really appreciate it. We—or at least I—are totally mooching off your hard work and I couldn’t me more grateful. And excited!”

MJ laughed, glancing down at her feet. Peter saw the smile curl up her face. “Yeah, well. It means you’re coming with me, right? I’d be lonely without you dumbasses.”

“Aw.”

“Shut up,” MJ chuckled. “Before I have to insult someone properly to make up for it.”  
The high-pitched screech of the subway rolling into their station caused Peter to clench his teeth—it was always so much more extreme for him. Ned and MJ sidled backward as the doors opened. Peter joined them, watching the straggling few leap off the cars and make their way toward whatever destination drew their attention. 

He hopped through the doors in turn, turning back to wave at his friends. Ned got on the A train, not the F, and MJ… well. He didn’t know about her. But halfway between when his hand raised and when he made to call out a goodbye, his words changed.  

“Do you want to get pizza or something?”

“Now?” Ned looked up.

“Yeah now. Quick, before the door closes.”

Ned looked at him, then at MJ. Then he blinked. Then he looked at Peter again, shrugging apologetically. “Sorry, can’t tonight! Maybe next week, though. As a celebration of the break.”

“Ah. No worries.” Peter stepped back, not wanting to get caught when the doors screeched shut. The automated  _ ‘Stand clear of the closing doors’  _ sounded throughout the car.

Before it could close off, however, MJ slid through the gap to stand beside Peter. “Might as well,” she said. “Bye, Ned!”

“Have fun,” Ned replied, and Peter saw him skip back to wait for his own train as the F pulled out along his rails.

Peter wandered toward the back of the subway, MJ following, before squeezing into a length of three open seats. He sat, pulling his backpack over so it rested on his knees. MJ let hers slide down to sprawl across her ankles. She leaned forward, braced her elbow on her leg, and looked at him.

“That was weird,” Peter observed. “Ned never has after-school plans. I wonder what he’s doing.”

“Earning himself a favor,” MJ replied somewhat cryptically. Peter raised an eyebrow.

Sitting back with a sigh, MJ ran her hands through her frizzing curls and hummed. It matched the tone of the subway’s movement. Peter tried to harmonize and failed spectacularly. Grimacing, he stopped, and MJ snorted. 

“For an oboeist, you really are tone-deaf.”

“Well, it’s different singing,” Peter responded automatically. Then, “hey, how did you—”

“Marching band. I go to games sometimes.”

“Oh.” Peter flushed. “Yeah… I’m not very good.”

“Yeah, might have something to do with the fact that in  _ no universe  _ is the oboe a marching band instrument.”

“Hey, they were short on members when the club started up.” Peter shrugged. “I was just trying to help.”

MJ snorted. “Fair. But still, there’s only so much oboeing one can do whilst marching in formation around a football stadium. But I bet you’d be rather good by now, if you practiced more. You haven’t for like nine months.” MJ leaned back in her chair, trying to get comfortable on the awkward train seats. 

“Well, nine months ago I got spider-powers so here we are.” Peter thought back to the last time he’d actually blown into his instrument, and winced. “I turned my oboe into the school pretty quick after that.”

“Yeah, Betty Brant uses it now,” MJ said. “Much better than you, I might add.”

The comment wasn’t malicious; a teasing jest, and Peter grinned. “Oboe-Wan is probably thanking that spider with all his woodwind heart right now.”

MJ stared at him. “Hold up.”

“What?”

“You named your instrument  _ Oboe-Wan.” _

Peter nodded. “Oboe-Wan Kenoboe actually. Ned wanted to call it ‘Oboe Baggins’ but we agreed  _ Star Wars  _ was better.” 

“You two are hopeless.” MJ threw her hands into the air with exaggerated emotion, before letting them fall onto her thighs with a slap. “I swear. We can’t do anything without a pun or a reference or a  _ reference pun.” _

“C’mon, you like it.” Peter elbowed her.

A sigh, a slap, and MJ relented, “fine, yes.” 

They settled back as the train dipped beneath the street and down toward Brooklyn, the unreliable lighting of the car replacing the sunlight through the windows. Peter flinched—he couldn’t help it. The car was big, big enough, but still crowding in on his perception in a way that was decidedly uncomfortable. 

But MJ’s voice, chiming into his thoughts at just the right time, led him away from the danger of a spiral. “So,” she said. “How far to this infamous pizza you promised me? Too far and I may have to bail on you for station food.”

Peter grimaced. “Station food, ew.”

“Don’t be picky. Au Bon Pain is quite good.”

“Only if you get eggs and bacon on an everything bagel,” Peter replied instantly. “Salt. And garlic.”

“Stop, I’m salivating.”

Peter laughed. “Fine, pizza soon. I know just the place.”

* * *

Peter wasn’t back yet. 

Loki glanced up at the clock for the umpteenth time, careful not to miss the connection of his knife with the target, far across the sprawling room. He’d found the training center Wednesday morning, wandering around in his snake form after declining to consume any breakfast. The irritation that  _ no one had told him  _ there was a room full of weapons at his disposal was somewhat intense, but Loki had no one to spew it at, so he’d taken it out on the nearest dummy. And the one after that. 

The days had been long, and somewhat boring, after Loki had woken up halfway through the week to find Peter off at school, the boy’s aunt at work, Happy nowhere to be found to terrorize, Stark avoiding him and the rest of the Compound as he had been since the start of the week, and Vision missing once again. The android had yet to return. 

And so had Peter. Loki was trying not to let himself get to concerned about that, although the last time Peter had been late it was because he’d almost died at the bottom of an elevator shaft. 

Loki stalked toward the target, prying his knife out of the center and testing the tip. It was a habit, though he’d long perfected the magic of refining the blade. He closed his eyes, pausing for a moment, then let himself whirl in the blink of an eye. His wrist tucked, then extended, sending his blade spinning through the air toward the opposite side of the room. 

_ Thunk. _

The sound was grotesquely satisfying, and Loki bared his teeth. He could feel his magic, his quantum connection to the sparking particles of his body and the realm around him, practically leaping to join the knife in use. He didn’t try to refuse it.

Leaping out around him in electric strings of emerald light, Loki’s magic seized the nearest objects and sent them flying. Their atoms forcibly relocated, the wooden targets and the set of observing chairs found themselves crashing against the ceiling, then down against the floor in a symphony of shatters. Loki spread his arms, swirling his power and connection until it was practically hissing. Then he snapped it forward in a concentrated burst. Freed from a suddenly dematerialized nest, Loki’s knife clattered to the floor.

That was the only sound as Loki’s magic dissipated, silence filling the room where the crackle of power had previously been. Loki found himself breathing hard, more from catharsis than exertion. 

“Well then,” a voice said from the edge of the room, sounding slightly squeaky but otherwise confident. “Good thing I kept the door closed.”

Loki turned, flicking his wrist to displace his knife back out of existence. “Stark,” he said. “What is your business here?”

Despite practically living in the man’s home, Loki had seen very little of Stark over the past few weeks. Anytime he did come across him was during planning sessions, updates, or times when he happened to be in the right kitchen when Stark wanted to eat. Loki wasn’t quite sure if he was being avoided or not; saving the world was a difficult task, after all. It infuriated the Asgardian that he couldn’t be of more help.

And as far as avoiding him… that was perfectly understandable.

Loki had yet to speak to Stark—really  _ speak  _ to him—about what he’d done. He wasn’t sure if that was considerate or cowardly. 

All motivations aside, seeing the engineer watching his opulent display of magic made Loki decidedly guilty.

“I was just passing by,” Stark explained, replying to Loki’s question. “On my way to the press center for some quick brainstorming with the crew over—” Noting Loki’s disinterested expression, Stark amended. “Well, anyway. I was passing by.”

 “Ah. I suppose I cannot blame you for interest in my skills,” Loki smirked. He manifested his knife (now back in his hand), and twirled it between his fingers. 

“Yes, actually,” Stark agreed. “I need to know more about them.”

Loki cocked his head, narrowing his eyes. “Oh?”

“Yup.” The man popped the ‘p’, leaning with far too much nonchalance against the doorframe. It seemed Loki wasn’t the only uncomfortable one. Stark continued, “I believe your magic might do us some good, mechanics-wise, when we start off toward the stars.”

Loki’s eyes narrowed further. “You ask me to create… a magic spaceship.”

Stark lifted his face to the heavens. “No, no, I don’t. I want you to help make a warp-core that will allow our  _ very scientific  _ spaceship to actually move through space at the speeds we need.”

“A magic spaceship.”

“Not the whole thing—God, I sound exactly like Peter.”

Loki straightened at the boy’s name. “Peter?”

“Yes…” Stark waved a hand. “The whole magic warp-core thing was his idea. You can tell because it might actually do us some good.”

Loki huffed a rueful laugh. “Without the boy of spiders, it is likely we would each have found death by this point.”

“Agreed.”

“Has he returned?” Loki asked, trying not to sound too nervous.

“What, Peter? Nah, he’s getting pizza with the girl.” 

Loki frowned. “And you know this…”

“He texted his aunt, his aunt texted Happy, Happy told me,” Stark said with a shrug. Then he looked at Loki, gaze skirting his form. “Right, you don’t have a phone.”

“Of course not,” Loki scoffed.

“Well, we’re gonna need to fix that.” Stark beckoned. “Come on.”

“Now, wait a moment—”

“Listen. This here is how we mortals communicate.” Stark lifted his sleek device between two fingers and spun it. The light glinted off the screen. “You associate with us, you’ve got to talk like us. Now let’s get you on the network.”

There was little choice but to obey, and Loki found himself trotting after Stark almost as though he’d been compelled. Of course, what else was he to do upon an order that direct? It couldn’t do any harm. 

Despite Loki’s attempts to stay behind the man, Stark always managed to match his pace; walking beside Loki step for step. It took until they reached their destination for the reason to sink in. Stark didn’t want Loki walking behind him—wanted to avoid the vulnerability necessary to look away from someone to lead them.

Loki eased his gait to make walking beside Stark easier. 

“Here you are,” the man said, slipping into what looked like a far neater, more organized version of his lab. “The prototype room. And also available stocks of the newest StarkPhone developments for my own personal use.”

Loki turned in a slow circle, observing the room around him. “You have a whole room for phones?”

“And the engineering of said phones,” Stark agreed. “People expect them every few months. It’s a fun project, when I’m in the mood, though the suits are  _ infinitely  _ more rewarding. Here.”

Loki barely managed to catch the object Stark hurled at him with  the abrupt subject change. Fumbling with it, he managed to secure it in his palm and lift it to the light. 

The phone was thin and gleaming, with a black screen that still managed to reflect Loki’s face with precision. He could see the green of his eyes flashing, illuminated in the stronger lights. The edge was peppered with buttons, and there was a large one in the lower center, which Loki poked experimentally. Blinking to life, Loki found himself suddenly blinded by an illuminated screen.

“That’s… rather elaborate,” Loki observed.

“Yes, only the  _ best  _ for you,” Stark replied sarcastically, moving over to stand beside Loki. “Here, let me.”

“By all means.” Loki happily handed over the device, watching as Stark clicked the lower button again.

“So, this is your lock screen,” Stark explained, pointing at the blueish background and the time and date displayed on it. “If you click the little button again—” he did— “the phone unlocks, and then you can use it.”

“That doesn’t seem very locked,” Loki observed.

“Well, no, but it automatically codes to your fingerprint and anyone you authorize, only permitting you to access its data whenever you press your finger to the sensor.”

Loki stared at him blankly.

Stark sighed. “Just click the button twice, okay?”

* * *

MJ, all things considered, thought she was doing a remarkably good job staying cool.

Here she was, sitting on a hard plastic stool in a tiny pizza joint, hands drumming on the tangled metal of her table, and watching Peter Parker fill up their fountain drinks to the very brim. He grinned at her when he turned, impeccable spider-balance letting him carry each back to the table without spilling a drop. 

Observation one. Observation  _ what the fuck,  _ observation Ned-fucking-Leeds had just forced her onto a date. Although, she was almost positive that the other participant in this arranged meeting had not yet picked up on what exactly he was doing. 

“So,” Peter said, slipping into the booth with two tall glasses of red-tinted plastic. “You still satisfied not bailing on me for bagels?”

“Yes, yes.” MJ waved a hand. “Pizza is infinitely better.”

_ Especially if it’s with you.  _

Immediately following the thought, MJ firmly ordered her brain to shut its mouth. 

Peter sat down, spinning one of the brimming glasses across the table to her. It didn’t so much as dribble down the outside. 

“Show off,” she grumbled, taking a sip. Though honestly, she wasn’t complaining; more drink for less money, anyway.

Despite the fact that Peter had paid.

Trying to take her mind off the awkwardness she was about to create between them, MJ focused on the restaurant around them. Observation one: a framed piece of actual artwork in the corner. Observation two: the color-coded straws and curtained-off kitchen. Conclusion: a family owned restaurant, not cloned and repeated anywhere else in the city, nor logically in the country. It was quaint. She liked it.

Plus it smelled absolutely divine. MJ took a long sniff, sipping her drink and wondering how strong the fragrance seemed to her sensorily-boosted dinner companion. He didn’t give her any clues. Lifting his knees up to his chest and bracing his hands on the cushion of the stool beneath him, Peter watched her offhandedly. 

“So,” MJ said, and set her drink down. “How are things?”

“Things?”

“Y’know, with the Avengers. How did Stark take our idea?”

“Rather well, all things considered.” Peter answered easily, nothing to cherry-pick his words from. “He said he wanted a few more days, but I don’t know if that’s lasted. We’re all in a hurry, y’know?”

“And he hasn’t told you the details?” MJ leaned forward, interested. Stark seemed to share quite a lot of their struggles and successes with the boy, as far as she’d seen. 

Peter hummed. “Well, no, I guess. He hasn’t talked to me much at all, but I’ve been patrolling so I figured it was just timing. If he’s been avoiding me, he’s probably been avoiding everyone else…” The boy looked troubled. “I hope I didn’t… Hm. I’ll ask him tomorrow.”

“Hope you didn’t what?” It was painfully obvious that Peter didn’t want to answer that question, but MJ asked it anyway. 

“He doesn’t… well he doesn’t  _ do  _ magic.” Peter waved his arms illustration. 

“Hm.”

“I just hope I didn’t hit a sore spot, y’know.”

“I don’t think you did,” MJ offered. “Stark may not even be avoiding you—and if he is, well. Often, when adults do that, it’s because they’re avoiding themselves.”

The words slipped out before she could stop them, and MJ winced. She hid it with a large gulp of soda, but Peter’s calculating eyes kept their focus. That should be illegal—only MJ was allowed to do the deducting.  _ Being  _ deducted was a definite no, especially when combined with the fact that a part of her liked his attention. 

_ What did I tell you about shutting your mouth? _

“Why do you want to leave New York so badly?” Peter asked.

Well fuck, that was a correct correlation. 

MJ’s instincts had her tensing, ready to make a break for the door.  Maybe her gaze darted to it, maybe she froze, maybe Peter made his own conclusions from her movements because he hurriedly backtracked. 

“You don’t have to tell me,” he almost yelped, words running together at the edges. “I don’t mean to pry. I was just wondering.”

“No it’s…” MJ swallowed, forcibly letting her shoulders relax and her legs start to swing again. “It’s fine.”  
“Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” MJ sighed, fingers trailing through the condensation on the outside of her glass. “It’s a good question. I suppose I haven’t exactly been subtle.”

Peter shook his head, still looking decidedly apologetic. He had an air like the golden retriever next door when it was left outside in the yard and the family had company over. Fully aware the thought was her avoidance of the question still hanging, MJ sighed.

“Okay, okay.” It was only the truth after all. Somewhere, MJ  _ wanted  _ to tell the story, wanted someone to understand instead of her doing the understanding. 

“It’s just… I’ve lived here my whole life. With my mom, and my dad, and my older brother.” MJ drew another smudge across the dew on the outside of her glass. The cold pressed against her fingers, and she touched them to her lip, transfering the coolness just to chart the change. “But about—about a year ago now, yeah, a year. My brother went off to go to school for dance—ballet, in Arizona. He’s really good. He’s only seventeen and he’s already the strongest one in the company.” She resisted the urge to reach for her phone, to pull up the pictures. This wasn’t about him, not this time. She didn’t have to pretend to be alright. 

“Yeah. But he was only fifteen when he left, and he couldn’t live on his own. The academy there isn’t a boarding school or anything; it’s just a finishing program. He went to school online.” 

Peter watched her, his head half cocked. Russet curls flopped over his ear and fingers where his head was propped against his palm, and he didn’t interrupt, not even when she paused to take another drink. 

“Anyway,” MJ continued. “My dad went off to live with him. The boys over there, the girls up hear.” MJ pressed two fingers apart, miming a split. “Clean divide, right down the middle.”

“Oh.”

“My parents love each other, very much. But a year away from the person you love most… it does things to you. It makes their absence the new normal, makes you stopping needing them. Stop thinking about them all the time. I can see that happening to my mother—she’s pretending like everything’s fine, like staying in New York to wait for me to finish my schooling is a  _ reasonable  _ thing to do to herself. And really, it’s cleaving her in two.”

MJ closed her eyes, resting her head against the wall behind her. In her mind’s eye, Madeline Jones smiled, rubbing the knot between MJ’s shoulder-blades and speaking those words, those same meaningless words, again and again.

“She says I can talk to her,” MJ sighed. “About all this. She says to tell her when I’m sad or angry, even when I’m angry at her, but I  _ can’t.  _ Because I’m always angry. I’m always sad, and I hate being avoided by her as she tries to avoid herself!” MJ caught her voice before it rose.

“I’m proud of my brother, I am. And I love my mom and my dad and what they’re doing for me, but I don’t want to stay here. If I go, there’s no reason for Mom to stay here. She can go be where she wants to be and I don’t have to feel like a  _ fucking inconvenience  _ every waking hour of every day.” 

She blinked, gaze still up at the ceiling. If she squinted, she thought she might be able to count the dots on the ceiling tiles. She’d only have to count them on one; every tile was identical, and she could multiply by the number of tiles to do the whole room. Probably the whole building, if she put her mind to it.

“I know,” she mumbled. “It’s stupid and selfish and I should just focus on school and figure it out when it’s relevan—”

“Hey.”

And there was the interruption, right when she needed it, right when she couldn’t help but begin to interpret his silence as judgment. Peter had leaned forward across the table. The way he watched her demanded she meet his gaze, and MJ considered nothing else. She glared at him: a challenge, a dare. 

_ Say the right thing,  _ she silently commanded.  _ I know you can.  _

She didn’t know how, not when she didn’t know what the right thing was.

“It’s not stupid,” Peter said definitely. “And so what if it is—it’s your feelings, your  _ brokenness.  _ And nothing’s ever logical about those, but it doesn’t make them stupid. And it definitely doesn’t make them unimportant.”

MJ snorted, turning her gaze back to the ceiling. “Uh-huh. Talking to the kid the universe keeps deciding is its pin-cushion, friends with the Asgardian lord of squandered emotion and ward of the human equivalent of Fort Knox.”

“There isn’t a comparison,” Peter insisted. “So what if other people are hurt? That doesn’t make you meaningless! It’s like… it’s like yes, there’s whole starving civilizations, but that doesn’t make the poor on the New York streets any less worthy of our help!”

“That was a remarkably in-character thing for you to say.”

“Don’t change the subject. Please?” Peter sat back, a sigh drawn from his throat, though MJ didn’t think it was frustrated. “The point is, thank you for telling me. I’m glad you did.”

MJ wasn’t sure she felt the same. But she wasn’t sure she regretted speaking, either. 

She was glad he hadn’t apologized, though.

Still looking toward the ceiling, MJ didn’t notice Peter reaching out until she felt his skin—cold from his own icy glass—against her hand. He squeezed her wrist. 

_ Physical reassurance, _ MJ’s mind whispered even as she stiffened.  _ That’s all it is. _

Still, she flipped her hand over so their palms were touching. Still, she wrapped her own fingers around his wrist. Still, she held hands across with Peter Parker across a pizza parlor table, Peter Parker who somehow managed to be so beautifully smart and empathetic and  _ utterly oblivious  _ all at the same time. 

Even still.

“You can talk to me,” she found herself saying. “About anything. Everything.”

Peter smiled. “I know. And you can talk to me. There’s no obligation, no expectation, but I’m here to help, to distract, to let you process—I’m  _ here. _ That’s what friends are for, right?”

MJ nodded. “Yeah. What friends are for.”

* * *

Achingly, Stark walked Loki through the very basics of the new device; how to turn it off, how to use his number, how to call and text and receive calls and texts. Loki’s usually quick, clever fingers felt clumsy and awkward as he tried to mirror Stark’s instructions. For such a backwards realm, Midgard was truly  _ astonishingly  _ complex. 

“There you are,” Stark said when Loki finally managed to call FRIDAY from the network. “If you have more questions, ask Peter. Seriously,  _ never make me do this ever again.” _

Loki eyed his phone, still not completely sure it wasn’t some virus sent from the dark gods. “Oh, fear not, I don’t intend to.”

“Good. Insured for life, but do try not to break it too often.” Stark clapped his hands twice, and the systems he’d booted up around the room immediately shut down. 

“This… allows me to connect to Peter?”

“Talk to him, yeah. And whoever else you want. On Earth—you can’t go calling Thor or whatever. Trust me, I’ve tried.”

“Hm.” Loki glanced at the phone again. Perhaps something useful would come of it. 

“Just don’t bother him during school,” Stark ordered, holding the door for Loki as they exited the crowded room. “He’ll get in trouble. But if you need to contact him, that’s your go-to. Not torturing the underground of New York for information.”  
Loki stiffened. “How do you know about that.”

Stark raised an eyebrow. “I… was kidding. That was a joke. Did you really—you know what, don’t answer that.” 

Loki chuckled. Awkwardly, he slipped the phone into his pocket and adjusted his tunic, then moved off down the hall. “Thank you,” he said.

“Yeah, no problem.”

Dismissals given, the two males dispersed. Loki figured he’d spend a bit of time outside, trying to figure out the more physical properties of his new device. But before he could skirt the first corner of the corridor, Stark’s voice reached his ears again. 

“Loki?”

Loki paused. “Yes?”

Stark didn’t answer for a moment, watching him with an unreadable expression. Loki waited, watching him back.

Finally, the man wondered, “Peter… Peter trusts you.”

Loki nodded, a bit of a smile dusting the edges of his usually cruel lips. “Yes. I rather think he does.”

“Why?”

Loki saw it in the word, saw the true question behind Stark’s words. He wasn’t asking what Loki had done to deserve it, he was asking  _ how.  _

In the center of his mind, Loki saw the list, saw the essential connection between this man and his child. The truth was easy, as he remembered. 

“I talked to him,” Loki said. “I told him the truth. I spoke to him about things that mattered; to our quest, but also to myself. He deserves it. Even the ugly parts. Even the  _ broken  _ parts. And he did the same to me.”

Stark nodded, curt and quick. He didn’t push the question. 

“He trusts you already, you know.” Loki clasped his hands before him. “It’s you who has yet to figure it out.”

Then he turned, and slid around the hallway in his silent gait, his footprints invisible on the Compound floor but etched in gold in Tony Stark’s mind. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Eventful, huh.
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	80. Only Fair

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HELLO ALL sorry I'm late! Peter isn't the only one in the midst of finals week... Anyway, have some banter and gaming for a little fun on this fine Saturday! :D

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Peter caught the train back to May’s workplace after MJ made her way home, buzzing with an energy that had come out of nowhere. He was full to bursting with pizza and questions and responsibilities and he hadn’t thought twice before wandering into the office and just curling up in one of the chairs to wait. 

There wasn’t quite enough time to patrol; May emerged from the ugly concrete staircase, hidden through the door behind the desk, in less than fifteen minutes. She smiled with an air of confusion when she saw Peter, who waved.

“Hey Aunt May,” he said. “Wanna drive me home? Or rather, let Happy do it?”

“Home,” his aunt repeated with a nod.

The bodyguard in question was lurking in a temporary parking space a block over, peering stormilly out of the windshield. He brightened up when he saw them—or rather, when he saw May. 

“Hey, Parkers,” Happy greeted. “Good day?”

“Certainly not a bad one,” May replied, swinging into the copilot's chair. Peter made himself at home in the back. 

For the lengthy trip upstate, Peter rifled in his backpack for his chemistry textbook. He’d already turned in all the others, but his last final was first thing Monday morning. It would do him good to just absorb some of the knowledge from earlier in the semester.

Of course, reading chemistry was an activity that sounded simple in theory, but when it came to actually paying attention to his textbook’s words, Peter’s actions left something to be desired. His head was buzzing, and not with school work. He wrung his hands, fingers ghosting over the knuckles of the other, as he remembered MJ’s hand around his wrist. He remembered how she had eaten her pizza with almost violent movements, something about her still angry and defensive. 

But she’d stayed, looked him in the eye, ate with him.

Peter didn’t know what that meant, but he was grateful for what it implied.

She didn’t regret telling him her story.

Peter read maybe two pages of chemistry before they were piling out of the car and wandering into the West wing of the Compound. Giving May a quick hug, he skittered around toward the East side and where he’d last seen Tony. 

It was strange, waking up and coming home to the Compound each day. Peter didn’t know what that made him. But he did know it was freeing, more than freeing, to not have to hide Loki or fear discovery. He knew it felt perfectly normal, perfectly natural, to seek out Tony Stark each day. 

“Hi FRIDAY!” Peter chimed as he moved through the Compound. 

“Hello, Mr. Parker.” There was a smile in FRIDAY’s voice, and in the flickering of the lights around him. “How was your day?”

“Awesome! I had pizza and… well, I talked with MJ. And it meant a lot.”

“That’s good,” FRIDAY said. “What did she say?”

“Not my story to tell.” Peter shrugged, slipping his hands into his pockets. “Maybe she’ll tell you eventually.”

“You are a good friend.”

“I hope so,” Peter agreed. “I can be stupid sometimes.”

“I disagree. Perhaps you can be oblivious—”

“Hey!”

“—but I would not call you stupid.”

“Thanks, I think?” Peter offered

FRIDAY chuckled, and it sounded just a little too much like Tony’s. Rolling his eyes, Peter said, “where is Mr. Stark? Is he busy?”

“The boss is in the East lounge. He was working, but now he appears to be staring at a wall.”

Peter skipped into a trot, speeding faster through the corridor. “Better get going then. Thanks!” 

“Of course.”

Peter’s trot turned into a loping sprint, weaving him around under the fluorescent lights until he found his way to the lounge. He had the layout the Compound almost memorized at this point; it was a testament to the size and complexity of the building that he had to pause and think about which turns to take even still. But it took less than five minutes to find where Tony was lingering. 

Or rather, where Tony was sprawled. The man was taking up the entire couch and half of the coffee table, glaring intently at the holoscreen in his hand when Peter made his entrance. 

“Hi” was Peter’s only announcement of his presence. It still made the engineer jump.

When Tony turned to look at Peter, his expression was shadowed. Thoughtful. On instinct, Peter made a face, and the over analytic frown softened to something amused. 

“Hey kid.” Shutting down the holoscreen, Tony swung his legs over onto the floor. 

Peter slid out of his backpack, dropping it behind the sofa. “What’s up?” he asked, vaulting over the back to land on the cushions with a bounce.  
“Don’t jump on the furniture,” Tony scolded by way of reply, hand clutching his paperwork to his thigh to keep the violent bouncing of Peter’s connection from knocking them away. 

“I didn’t—”

“Don’t vault onto it either,” Tony amended, flicking in Peter’s direction. He made himself comfortable again, his swathing workload now pooling out to avoid Peter. 

“What are you doing?” Peter leaned over the papers, casting his shadow on the typeface. Tony swatted him away.

“Research. I’m not the only one who’s studied the makeup of alien ships.”

Peter gasped dramatically. “Is this  _ SHIELD  _ material, Mr. Stark? Isn’t it encrypted?”

“Encrypted-shmypted,” Tony scoffed. “Child’s play. Bet even your buddy Ned could manage to get through in less than two hours.”

“Oh, I’d give Ned less than one.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “So confident?”

“He hacked  _ your  _ tech, didn’t he?”

“Fair.” Tony shuffled the papers, pulling up his holoscreen again. 

“Why are they papery?” Peter wondered.

Tony raised his eyebrows, huffing slightly at the repeated interruption. “‘Papery’? You mean why I have my data out on hard copies instead of working with it purely on a screen? You kids and your tech.”

“He says, talking to his AI and holding his holoprojecting computer screen.”

“I change with the times.”

Peter poked the papers. “My question still stands.”

“I like the hard copies when I’m designing. It makes it easier to diagram and calculate. Both of which I’m doing, or was,” Tony said pointedly.

Peter raised his hands in surrender, folding himself over the back of the couch to haul his overweight backpack up onto the cushion next to him. “Fine, fine, I’ll be quiet. I have chem to study, anyway.”

“You, quiet? Somehow, I doubt it.”

Peter rolled his eyes, barely catching himself before he said something else. He aggressively closed his mouth, glaring at Tony, who grinned innocently. But Peter was determined to prove this little point, so he held his tongue and rifled through his back, setting up for a couple of practice equations. Tony returned to his own work. 

The two sat in companionable silence for a long while, scribbling and problem-solving and just thinking. It didn’t matter if they weren’t working the same issue; the air of connection was wrought by simply concentrating in the same space. It felt comfortable, homey even. Enough that Peter was smiling as he worked through his pH calculations. 

And if he forgot Tony’s little silence challenge after a few minutes, who was to know? Especially if he was breaking it with a quiet inquiry for help;  _ ‘I don’t understand this.’ _

It was only natural to ask the genius, after all.

* * *

Loki was having far too much fun.

He’d been having far too much fun for a while. Returning to the training hall after his little confab with Stark, Loki had been struck with the need to experiment, to  _ challenge.  _ So he’d started with the objects he had access to, seeing if he could move them or destroy them or replicate them. But objects weren’t an interaction. They weren’t sentient, and so they couldn’t be tricked. Loki wanted to one-up something, and that was  _ distinctly difficult  _ when the something in question was half a wooden post and some fabric. 

The logical option had then been FRIDAY. The AI was curious about his actions, and it was a stimulating hour or so during which he tried to root out all sources of her observation. Hidden cameras, speakers, wiring; Loki had to discover each before he could have a chance of fooling her. 

But FRIDAY had other jobs, and with Peter still in New York and the rest of Loki’s associates likely unwilling to allow him to fuck with their heads, the god was soon left alone with buzzing magic and a slowly forming idea.

It had only taken him a few moments. Texting Peter had taken longer, all things considered—honestly, how was he supposed to manage such small finger-sensors? A brilliant device, but almost completely unusable. Disgraceful. 

So really, the maze was only fair. Loki got frustrated; he frustrated back. 

It was time to spice up this training hall a bit.

* * *

The buzzing of Peter’s phone sent both him and Tony jumping—high enough that the latter’s holoscreen went tumbling to the ground. 

Irritated, Tony moved to pick it up, but his expression went over Peter’s head as he focused on his phone. Peter frowned, confused. This was the sixth message this afternoon from some mystery number, and he could safely say he was annoyed at this point. “Who  _ is  _ this? I’ve gotten like fifty texts from them and I can hardly decipher them! ‘ _ R yoo bak’.”  _ Peter peered at the letters, squinting. “Who the fuck spells like that?”

Tony stiffened. “All the letters sent individually?”

Peter looked up sharply. “How did you know?”

“Phone number  _ 202-555-0176?” _

“Yes…”  
Tony chuckled. “That would be your Asgardian friend, trying to spell phonetically. I gave him a phone.”

Peter blanched, so comically that Tony’s chuckle turned into a full-on laugh. 

“You did  _ what?” _

“I gave him a phone.” Tony rolled sideways, scooping up his papers again. “He was worried about you. Plus, we’ll be able to track him better this way.”

He’d given  _ Loki  _ a phone? Given Loki access to YouTube? To Google? To  _ Tumblr?  _ Oh God… Peter could only imagine the mischief that his friend could stir up given the mask of a username and the untraceability of a StarkPhone.

“You’ve destroyed us all,” Peter squeaked. “Loki’s on the internet. The end times approach.”

“Oh, stop being so dramatic.” Tony tossed his screen onto the table, swinging his legs off onto the ground. “But anyway. We’d better go check on him. I haven’t heard any explosions for at least the last hour and a half.”

“Explosions?” Peter stood, following Tony’s lead and sliding into his backpack as the man slipped his sleeves into his hoodie—the same slightly tattered one he’d been wearing that day they’d gotten ice-cream. 

“Yes, he’s in the training room,” Tony explained. “I’ve been hearing the crashes since this morning. I think he’s lonely.”

“Doesn’t mean you need to play with fire and give him access to the internet.” 

“It’s not—”

“Mr. Stark, it’s Loki. He’s chaotic enough in real life, and you’re letting him explore the deepest pits of our hellish realm?” Oh  _ God,  _ if Peter ever heard a vine out of his brother-in-arms’s mouth…

Actually, that would be pretty funny.

“He has no idea how to use it,” Stark objected, holding the glass door open for Peter as they made their way out of the East wing. “I offloaded the responsibility of teaching onto you. Congratulations.”

“Great.” Peter was happy to help Loki, especially if it meant he got to maybe ease the world into its new association with the Asgardian.

“Whatever you’re comfortable with.”

Peter giggled. “Oh, I’m comfortable with—”

“I swear to God, if you mention the snake in your shirt  _ one more time,  _ I will omicanon you into a wall.”

Peter pouted exaggeratedly, dragging his feet across the icy ground. “You’re no fun.”

“I’m no fun when I’m stressed and sleep deprived and running on caffeine.” Tony stretched his arms above his head, vertebrae popping with impressive volume. Peter jumped.

“And you’re not even in the midst of finals week…”

“The week’s over now,” Tony pointed out.

“That’s the most encouraging thing you’ve said all day.”

Tony chuckled, and it was Peter who held the door open this time as they made their re-entrance. The blast of hot air was enough to make Peter shiver and turn his face away. Letting the door swing closed, Peter trotted to catch up with his mentor, swinging through the huge double doors to the training hall in the same step.

They were met with a rather bizarre image. 

Loki had stacked every one of the various targets, dummies, chairs, coils of rope, pieces of exercise equipment, and weapons racks into a large, maze-like structure spreading out from the center of the room and was roosting in the center of it like some sort of demented hen. He’d left the projection tech alone, thankfully, but nothing else had been spared in his ruthless redecorating. Peter saw the green tint around the edges of the room, creeping out toward them, and stepped forward.

Tony stepped back.

“Loki!” Peter called, waving frantically. “What in the world are you doing?”

Loki looked up from what Peter could now distinguish to be the infamous StarkPhone, and waved with sadistic excitement. 

Then, in half a moment, he disappeared. 

“What the—”

Before Peter could finish his sentence, something blunt and heavy had smacked against his shoulder. He barely managed to keep his balance, stumbling forward. 

Something fizzled into existence in front of him; Loki, that same expression of challenge and scheming on his sharp features. Peter lunged, but he passed right through the Asgardian—or rather, the image. Like a ripple, the magic around him shifted, revealing a whole new maze of junk and an entirely different Loki, skittering off inside it.

Peter didn’t have to think twice. 

“Oh, so  _ that’s  _ how you wanna play this, you old snake?”

Beaming at Tony, Peter slid out of his backpack and dumped everything out of it with non-existent ceremony. Tony looked caught between hesitance and excitement. Hoping to knock that expression toward the latter, Peter didn’t hesitate to slap the web-shooters onto his wrists. He jerked his head toward the maze, flexing his fingers and feeling the metal shift and curve with his movements. 

“C’mon,” he encouraged. “It’s a game.”

Tony looked at the greenish hue to the world around him, then back at Peter. He blinked, once, slow and halting, and then he nodded. 

Peter grinned wider. 

Then he let his wrist shoot forward, latching on to the beam of the ceiling, and leapt.

Whooping, Peter swung wide. He shoved his hand out, using it as a flag to test what objects were real and which dissolved beneath his touch. Catching something solid, he let himself stick, screeching to a halt and clamoring up on top of the maze. He could see movement toward the inside. Eyes narrowing, Peter jumped forward, latching himself onto the object beneath him that he knew wasn’t an illusion in case he found nothing to swing from to keep his momentum.

It was more difficult than he’d thought, staying above the walls of a labyrinth that was only half there. Peter’s gaze whipped through the curves and twists and forks as he paused atop each true object he found, flagging it with a small splatter of webbing. 

Landing softly, Peter climbed onto the floor, now near the center of Loki’s maze. He was pretty sure the wall in front of him was fake, and that Loki—or at least, this decoy version—was around the edge of it, but he couldn’t be sure.

And then Tony burst straight through it, magic flickering out around him as half a gauntlet formed around one of his hands.

Peter reacted on instinct. He sent a rapid-fire bolt of three quick splatters toward Tony’s repulsor with enough force to web him to the wall behind—which of course, did not exist. The man had just enough time to yelp out an exclamation before he was forced into a spin with the power of the impact, gauntlet whirring as it was suddenly engulfed in Peter’s sticky netting.

“Um, I’m on your side?” Tony huffed as soon as Peter had hurriedly lowered his wrists.

“Sorry, uh, sorry!” Peter squeaked. “My head was under the distinct impression that you were a bad guy and I just sort of reacted and I can fix that for you—”

He reached out toward the webbed repulsor, but Tony lifted his other hand to stop him. Before Peter’s curious gaze, the gauntlet  _ folded  _ in on itself. A million minuscule particles retracted away from the webbing, simply disappearing from beneath it and leaving it nothing to hold to. The netting fell against the training room floor with a slap.

“Woah.”  
Tony smirked. “I haven’t been idle, kid. That’s just the beginning.”

“Did you fly here? You got through quite quick.”  
“Nah.” Tony shrugged. “The walls are fake. You were kind enough to mark them off for me so all I had to do was just jog right over here. Now, where’s this Asgardian of yours?”  
  
  


 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Loki ily


	81. All

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This hurt... hope I handled it well. Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Tony dreamed of the future, that Friday night.

Is was a different dream than the ones that sent him into memories of the Stalk, different even than the ones that had haunted him for the days since his return from the astral plane. Lately, he’d dreamed of reaching out for his daughter only to pass through her, again and again and again. He’d dreamed of scratching at the walls of the dimension, screaming the names of the family he’d once and never had, to no avail. He’d dreamed, and he’d hated them. 

He tried to keep from taking it out on Peter or Loki or Pepper herself. But he couldn’t help avoiding them, avoiding himself, any more than he could avoid his quick temper and on-edge attitude. 

And he couldn’t seem to stop. He couldn’t seem to get  _ out. _

That was scarier than anything else. 

He didn’t remember the dream upon his filtering into consciousness in the early Saturday sun. He didn’t remember it throughout most of the day, not until he was wandering out of the kitchen after a prudent search to find something to eat—the first thing he’d consumed that day—and saw Loki and Peter chatting in one of the side rooms. They had pulled their chairs to the same side of the table so Peter could have an easier view of what was happening on Loki’s phone screen. And they were laughing. Without reservation, without hesitation, they were laughing.

Tony, struck with a surge of something far too close to jealousy, retreated almost faster than the speed of sound. 

Like a tingle of deja-vu, Tony began to recall words—a certain Asgardian’s words, repeated twice over. He remembered hearing them, and slowly, he remembered dreaming about them. They repeated in his mind, a near-silent, tickling whisper. 

_ “I talked to him. told him the truth. I spoke to him about things that mattered; to our quest, but also to myself. He deserves it.” _

Tony blinked.

That was all he could do as the quiet whispers turned to demands, to orders, in his mind.  _ I spoke about things that mattered,  _ Loki’s voice repeated. Things that the other should know, had the  _ right  _ to know, given without hesitance. Loki had found the balance, it seemed, between the secrets you deserved to keep, and the ones you had the responsibility to share. 

He’d been speaking of Peter, and Tony had been thinking of the boy. Down below everything, some part of Tony was always wondering about that kid. Standing here now, however, the secrets that Tony couldn’t help but think of weren’t the ones he was keeping from Peter. Not the ones that had corroded at his soul since Monday night, at least. Not the ones that kept him hiding. 

“FRIDAY?” Tony said slowly, shifting his weight into his heels.

“Yes, boss?”

Swallowing, Tony asked, “Where’s Pepper?”

“Ms. Potts is currently in the East Wing PR center. Would you like me to tell her you’re heading in her direction?”

Tony nodded. Whatever anxious indecision had grown in his head at his own question was undermined by the easy, routine words of FRIDAY. He let her question send his feet into motion almost of their own accord, and started off toward his CEO. 

Loki and Peter were West, so Tony didn’t have to worry about bumping into them as he stalked through the direct, well-lit Compound corridors. Lifting a hand to trail against the bay windows, Tony quickened his pace when he reached the edge the Compound’s center. Technically, the wings were connected, but Tony preferred to travel over the yard. It was cold, but not enough to make him too uncomfortable in the quick jaunt over to the West side.

Pepper was waiting for him when he arrived. She waved to him, half-concentrating on his approach and half scribbling something into her tablet. Always productive, always essential—she was doing something worthwhile.

_ This is a bad idea. This—I should come back later. At a better time.  _

He knew perfectly well that there wouldn’t be a later, or any ‘better time’.

But then Pepper was closing the screen, tucking it behind her and looking fully at Tony. The moment was gone. Pepper cocked her head, the elegant movement sending her crystalline hair cascading in that consistent maelstrom. Regardless of color or length, her hair always seemed to move in those captivating tumbles.  _ She  _ always seemed to move like that.

Tony took a deep breath.

“Hey, Pep,” he said. “Got a minute?”

“Exactly sixty seconds,” Pepper replied with a bit of a smirk.

Tony couldn’t muster up one in return. “This is gonna take longer, I’m afraid.”

A beat, and Pepper’s joviality fell away, replaced with something concerned and confused. Her hand flashed out to set the tablet on a nearby table. She strode over to where Tony was lingering, demanding explanation simply in the pace of her steps. With a sigh, Tony sat. The metal chair creaked, comfortably matching the curve of his neck as most of the Compound chairs had been designed to do. 

Pepper’s concern deepened—sitting down conversations meant something beyond bad news of the company, or drama with the Accords, or political struggles that Tony was butting up against. Sitting meant painful. Sitting meant  _ personal.  _

“What is it?” Pepper inquired, sliding into her own seat.

_ What you deserve to know.  _

He watched her, remembering what she looked like so many years in the future and across so many universes. He remembered her smile, her wave, the dirt under her fingers and against her cheeks. He could almost see the chicken at her feet, it’s name inevitably something clever and quirky and stemming from Morgan. Morgan, the little devil that gave his wife the specific tired, soft gaze she didn’t have in this world. Tony remembered the contented  _ normality  _ that Pepper’d finally gotten to accept. That Tony had gotten to accept at her side. 

Everything he’d ever dreamed of. 

“I’m gonna ask you a hypothetical question, okay?” Tony began, rifling in his pocket for his sunglasses. He slotted them over his nose, thankful that he could spend the energy it took to control his expression on choosing his words. He would need it. 

“Yeah,” Pepper said, sounding slightly suspicious. “Go for it.”

“Say, hypothetically, that we got married,” Tony began.

Pepper sat back, expression slamming through a thousand different emotions. “Tony.”

_ “Hypothetically.” _

Pepper rolled her eyes, but Tony waited, not taking his shielded gaze from her until she nodded. “Fine. Hypothetically, say we were married.”

“Right. And in this supposed situation, we had a daughter.”

Pepper’s expression flickered again. Tony could have tried to read it—he should have. But he couldn’t quite bare to determine if the thought made her happy, excited,  _ amazed,  _ or if it scared her. Maybe both.

“Morgan,” Pepper said.

Tony nodded. “Right, that’s what I was thinking.”  
Pepper frowned, as if trying to determine where that name had come from. Afraid to break the hypothetical before he had to, Tony let her.

“My eccentric uncle,” Pepper finally said.

“Yes, whatever.” Tony pretended to ignore that importance, waving a dismissive hand. “Point is, she’s there. And we’re happy, for a good… say, five years? More or less.”

“Okay…” Pepper’s eyes had narrowed.

Tony’s fingers drummed on the table at an increasingly aggressive rhythm, starting as a waltz and becoming an impossible jumble of beats as fast as his muscles could fire. The sound matched his heartbeat and the speed of his thoughts. 

“And then, say I die.”

Pepper blinked. “I’m suddenly disliking this hypothetical scenario.”

Tony shook his head, sunglasses bouncing. “Okay, but now I’m dead, and you’re stuck with our daughter, right?”

“Right…”

“And then,  _ hypothetically,  _ you move on.”

Pepper’s eyes narrowed. “Where is this going, Tony?”

“You move on; I dunno how many years pass. You grieve like a normal person, and like a normal person, you find a new future. Get engaged to someone else, I dunno.” 

He didn’t know. Maybe she met Unathi through the company. Through some coincidence on the New York street. Maybe those coincidences just kept coming, coming until she realized they weren’t coincidences but normalities. Things that would have occurred anywhere, but here they happened with the right person.

Unathi D’Kash and the devotion Tony’d seen in a single freeze-frame of their life.

Unathi D’Kash, whom Tony had every reason to hate, but no right to do so. The man didn’t deserve it, and neither did Tony—nothing was coincidence in this multiverse, it seemed.

“Say you were happy again.”

Pepper waving to the man in the kitchen window, every aspect of the image slotting into place. Every aspect being  _ right.  _

“Say our daughter was happy again.”

Morgan on her doghouse, reaching for the sky once again. 

“And then,” Tony began, focusing back on this Pepper’s— _ his  _ Pepper’s—face, “because this is a hypothetical scenario, say I came back to life. Years later.”

Pepper huffed an exasperated chuckle, though the smile she gave was strained. Tony hid his wince. 

“You insist on repeatedly tearing hypothetical me’s life into pieces, don’t you,” Pepper sighed.

Tony grinned exaggeratedly. “Don’t you know it, sweetheart.” 

“So now I supposedly have a daughter and two husbands and no idea what to do?”

“Basically,” Tony said with a shrug. Then, “I’m wondering what  _ would  _ you do.”

“Why?” Pepper huffed, her confusion morphing into something with a tinge of frustration. “Why this absurdly specific scenario for an absurdly random question?”

“It’s important,” Tony said. “To me. Just—I need to know this before I can… yeah. Just think about it, okay?”

Pepper watched him, her piercing blue eyes lasering right through Tony’s futile defenses. He shifted awkwardly under the attention like a suspect beneath the interrogation lamp. The deductions flickered past in Pepper’s mind, and Tony drummed his fingers ever faster and waited for her to understand. He knew she would.

“Tony,” she said. 

Tony closed his eyes.

“Is this about the future dimension? Are you predicting… are you wondering about the merge?”

He couldn’t lie; why would he? “Yeah. I’m just—it’s a long time. A long time.”

“A lot can change,” Pepper agreed, echoing Strange’s words from the astral plane right back at Tony. He tried not to flinch. She continued, “A lot can change in not very much time. You can’t know what’s going to happen.”

“But say it did,” Tony insisted. 

“You  _ can’t  _ know. There’s so many variables, so many possibilities… we’ll know what happened in our other timeline when we merge and get our memories back. We’ll be able to act based on it. There are too many options to try and answer every uncertainty now, Tony.”

“There’s trillions of connections in the human brain, but I can code an AI that can react to almost any situation.” Tony’s fingers had stopped their drumming, now swooping in large circles across the tabletop. 

“Different.”  
“I know it’s different. But—”

“You can’t know.”

_ I can. I do.  _

But that was his secret. His lie, the one he had to keep hiding for now. The one he had to protect her from. 

Tony knew exactly what was waiting for him, and he knew he wouldn’t be remembering his story upon the merge. He knew the most in this world, but would understand so  _ little  _ later. What would it feel like, to wake up in a future he didn’t belong in? Who would it turn him into? How would it change him?

Would there be any change at all?

Perhaps it would be home. But now, sitting before Pepper and recalling all the things he had yet to do, the Stalk was as alien as the universe he was about to venture out into. 

That was his uncertainty, however. Tony stood with the understanding that he wasn’t ready to share it.

“You’re right,” he sighed. “I can’t know.”

“Of course I’m right.” Pepper quirked a grin. “But thanks for the thought exercise.”

Tony saluted ruefully, spinning on his heel and moving to leave the room. He could feel pale blue eyes on him. There were always eyes on him, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t feel them. It didn’t mean he couldn’t feel hers.

He could always feel hers.

Walking away from Pepper in the conference room, some part of Tony’s mind began walking away from her, too. 

“Wait.”

The word was sharp and soft, quiet and deafening all at the same time. Tony couldn’t have kept moving if he wanted to. He paused, sunglasses dripping down his nose, foot half-extended and shoulders half tensed. Caught, mask half off, Tony waited. 

“Hypothetically,” Pepper said slowly, choosing her words with careful precision, “I’d be frozen. For a long time, I’d be frozen. I’d probably try to get someone else to make the decision for me, or try to logic it out, because my true feelings wouldn’t be the ones I’d want to have. They’d make me guilty. So I’d ignore them.”  
Tony said nothing.

“But I think… I don’t think I’d want to go back.”

The winter sunlight streamed in through the Compound windows, settling in swaths across Pepper’s face, across her hair. It dusted her cheeks like the frost and the dew on the dead grass outside, like stars across the endless night sky.

And Tony Stark closed his eyes.

“I still—I’d still—hypothetically—I’d still love you,” Pepper whispered. “But if I managed to fall in love again… I don’t think I could go back. To move on from yet another life to return to one I’d already lost… I’d only be bitter and angry. It wouldn’t be fair, to anyone. Especially not to this hypothetical you.”

Tony swallowed. “And the girl?”

“Our daughter.”

Tony heard the unsaid ‘ _ still’  _ lingering at the front of Pepper’s sentence, and something heavy and sickening lifted, just slightly, from his chest. It slid—a soggy, oozing mass—into his throat and up onto his tongue, locking away his words. He wanted to gag. He wanted to scream. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t  _ fair— _ he was leaving behind everything he’d ever dreamed, before he’d ever gotten to reach out for it.

In that moment, Tony seethed. Seethed with something burning and corrosive for this entire fucked up situation. For Pepper, for Unathi, for Strange and for Loki, for Thanos and this multiverse. For himself.

He wouldn’t even get to remember her. 

Always on the outside, looking in. It would stay that way, it seemed.

But Pepper Potts, highlighted in the sunny gold and the clean shadows of this world, deserved a choice. She deserved the life she wanted to live, the life she’d build around him, in spite of him, regardless of all he’d done to inadvertently and advertently tear it down. 

He wouldn’t remember her.

He wouldn’t remember, because he already got to live a life, make a choice. He’d already gotten to love. And if he tried again, he’d have to start over anyway, in a story that was already half-written. 

It wouldn’t be fair. It wouldn’t be fair to  _ her.  _

So Tony hid his face in the glare of the sun and nodded. 

“Will that be all, Mr. Stark?” Pepper asked quietly.

Something in Tony’s chest shattered. 

“That will be all, Ms. Potts.”

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :')


	82. Easier this Way

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> FINALLY

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

“It’s freeze-your-boogers cold out there, Mr. Stark,” Peter announced as he burst into the lab doors that evening. Weekend stories and widespread plans were nearly erupting from his mind, and he hadn’t thought twice before wandering into Stark’s workshop. 

_ ‘Welcome home,’  _ FRIDAY always cooed when he buzzed himself in.  _ ‘Welcome home.’ _

He always heard the AI’s words, but as he stepped over the threshold of the lab, his own declaration fell on a silent space, empty and echoing. Peter let his arms drop from where he’d raised them in passionate exclamation and frowned.

“Mr. Stark?”

No answer.

Peter crossed his arms, leaning against the lab doorway. “I know you’re in here; FRIDAY said. What’s up?”  
A huff wheedled over to Peter’s ears. Not one of pain, thank God, but one of frustration, exhaustion, and loneliness. Peter darted forward, and his overflowing backpack crashed onto one of the tables. He followed the sound like a hound might follow a scent, his sensitive perception latching onto the noise.

Eventually, he found himself peering upside-down beneath one of the lab tables. Tony Stark stared back at him, looking generally displeased with his actions.

“Oh hey Mr. Stark,” Peter said. “What are you doing under there?”  
“Craving the sweet release of death,” Tony grumbled, scooching further under the table. His voice was slightly muffled through the plastic and metal. 

“Same.”

Peter unfolded out on top of the table, brushing a couple of stray tools out of the way. He pulled his phone out of his back pocket so it wouldn’t jab into his thigh and sighed. Tony kicked him under the table. Turning his head to speak through the surface, Peter said, “so, what’s biting?”

“That’s not a phrase. No one says that.”

Peter rolled his eyes. “What’s going on then?”

“Don’t roll your eyes at me, young man. I can hear it happening from down here.”

Peter huffed a laugh, flopping sideways on the table until he could peer over the side and observe Tony. The man was glaring at him, eyes unobscured—Peter saw his sunglasses resting open on the tile floor beside him. As though they’d fallen there. 

Peter frowned, though just his eyes and nose were visible over the edge of the table. “Why is the sweet release of death such an inviting lure to venture beneath the table?”

“I like it down here,” Tony said defensively. “It’s private.”

“There isn’t anyone else in the lab. Or there wasn’t.”

“Nuance.”

“Mr.  _ Stark.” _

“Fine, fine.” Tony raised his hands as high as he could in his curled position. “I am recovering from a fit of dissociation so strong I was granted a twisted vision of the future without me in it, which rejected me when I did arrive.”

“That’s… too ridiculous to be a lie.” Peter ran his hands through his dangling hair, trying to keep it out of his eyes. “Did this dissociation happen to involve rocks with tendencies to glow and float?”

“Perceptive, you are.”

Peter flopped furthur over the side, his whole face upside-down at this point. Blood rushed to his face, and he knew he must look absurd. He tucked his hands beneath his neck to keep the sharp corner of the table from cutting off his airflow.

“Are you okay?”

“Dunno, kid.” Tony shrugged, his half-smile cast in shadow. It made the usually flippant expression somewhat eerie.

“Is the table helping?” Peter supplied. He was at a loss for what to say—what  _ could  _ he say?

_ Ask him. _

“The table certainly doesn’t hurt.”

Peter hummed. “I, uh… well, that’s good—”  
“Peter.”  
“Yeah?”

“Could you… could you just talk? About something?  _ Anything?”  _

The tone of the man’s voice was almost a plea. It was far from begging, but edging close enough to it that surprise and the undeniable, unexpected urge to  _ protect  _ that had Peter startling.

_ Help me,  _ Peter heard behind the words. 

So Peter did talk. He smiled and he opened his mouth and he just talked, slowly phasing out of the awkward bumbling of his words and into something genuine and clear. He talked about school, about finals, about the last day on Monday and how Ned had told him to thank Tony for all his help. Peter talked about the subway, and about his pizza meeting with MJ. Not wanting to share a story that wasn’t his, he left out MJ’s retelling of her family, of her brother. He did ask Tony to remind him to look up the ballet school in Arizona, though. 

At some point, he slid off the top of the table and crawled beneath it. At some point, he had settled next to Tony and was talking beyond his interests, beyond his daily activities. Peter got on the subject of Spider-Man. And at some point, Tony started talking back. 

“You haven’t left reports this week,” the man observed. 

“Well, yeah. I see Happy every evening when he drives me and May home—I mean, back over here.” Peter shrugged. 

“Yes but  _ I  _ don’t get to hear about it,” Tony huffed. “Depriving the old man of his entertainment. Blasphemy.”

Peter glared at him. “Like you even listen to them.”

Tony raised his eyebrows, a hand pressing to his chest in mock offense. “Um,  _ rude.  _ Bold of you to assume I don’t—didn’t—listen to and enjoy all your little updates.”

“Oh, shut up.”

“Don’t believe me?” Tony stuck his head out from under the table—for the first time since Peter had entered the lab. The boy must have been here at least an hour.

“FRIDAY?” Tony called. 

“Yes, boss?”

“Play our favorite from the  _ Refrigerator Magnets Protocol, _ would you?”

“Right away boss.”

Tony swung back beneath the table, grinning at Peter with a triumphant energy. Peter waited, not sure what to expect, as FRIDAY’s voice phased into silence, to be replaced with his own.

_“‘Hi Happy! Tell Mr. Stark happy birthday for me—don’t think I didn’t remember. I had a good run tonight; found this kid’s lost dog all the way in Brooklyn! The little girl was from Queens. And the puppy was so_ cute! _Bet it would have made even you smile. Must’ve been like a pomeranian-husky mix… gosh I’m squealing just thinking about it!_ _  
__“Yeah so the dog, and also a mugging by this one deli. I was having a Capr—I was just hanging around, and I noticed the commotion. Didn’t even get stabbed this time—”_

Tony regarded Peter pointedly, mouthing “those are  _ not  _ our favorites from the fridge protocol.”

_ “—so that’s a plus! Yeah. Let me know when there’s some big stuff to do… I’m always ready if Mr. Stark needs me. _

_ “It’s Peter Parker, by the way. Bye.” _

Peter, at this point, was blushing  _ obscenely.  _ Tony chuckled as the message ended and Peter buried his head in his arms and squeaked like the pomeranian-husky in question. He remembered that day; it had been raining, but he’d stayed almost perfectly dry under the mostly waterproof suit. 

He and Ned had sung Iron Man a happy birthday that day during lunch, laughing all the while. 

He never expected Tony had heard it.

“I listen to all the messages, kid,” Tony said quietly.

Something cracked open in Peter’s mind, then. Some walnut-sized cage of bitterness and confusion and something else, something warm and golden and shining that Loki had given him a name for, creaked open on rusty hinges and Peter asked— _ demanded,  _ “then why didn’t you respond?”

_ Why didn’t you acknowledge me? Why didn’t you talk to me? Why didn’t you teach me, mentor me like you promised? Like I wanted?  _

_ Why weren’t you there for me? _

“I don’t know,” Tony sighed. “I don’t know.”

Peter wasn’t having it. “No,” he declared. “No, that’s not true. There was a reason, I  _ know  _ there was, there has to have been. Don’t pretend like it doesn’t exist.”

“I—”

“Why not, Mr. Stark?” Peter couldn’t keep the tremble out of his voice. There was vulnerability in his stance, in both of their stances, curled up beneath the workshop table. It gaped between them, heavy and suspended, and it sucked the silence into something deeper.

“Because I was afraid.”

Peter looked at the man, too relieved to be judgmental or surprised.

Tony’s hand snuck out toward his sunglasses, but Peter’s own fingers carefully, but firmly, settled on top of them. Not in restraint, but in encouragement:  _ it’s alright,  _ Peter tried to convey.  _ You don’t have to hide. _

“I was afraid too,” Peter said quietly.

“Yeah, but I’m not supposed to be.”

“Who says?”

Tony sighed. “That’s the problem, kid. Nobody says, nobody but me. And it’s a lot harder to change my own mind, even if I am the most charming individual on this planet.”

“What were you afraid of?”

“Hurting you.”

There had been no expectation when Peter asked the question, but that was  _ not  _ the answer he had imagined. He must have stiffened, for Tony’s hand retracted from beneath his own. The man was wincing. Peter relaxed, almost aggressively, and moved just a tad bit closer. 

“I don’t think anything you could have done would have hurt more than making me think you didn’t care,” Peter murmured. He didn’t know if saying the words was cruel, and he regretted them almost instantaneously. But they were the truth, and Peter deserved to speak them. Tony deserved to hear them. 

The engineer looked up sharply, this time meeting Peter’s eyes without hesitation. “I do care, kid. You have to believe that.”

“I do, now,” Peter assured.

“I cared then, too, which is why I didn’t speak to you. I was protecting you.”

“From  _ what _ ?” The words came out a bit snappish, a bit irritated. Peter couldn’t help it; he didn’t  _ understand. _

“From  _ me!”  _

Tony’s voice rose, echoing slightly in the quiet space. It was thunderous to Peter’s enhanced ears, but that wasn’t why the boy inhaled sharply, or why he winced. He looked at Tony, eyes wide. Uncomprehending.

“Do you know what happens to the people I care about, Peter? What happens to the people I trust?”

Silently, Peter shook his head.

Tony laughed darkly. “They get burnt. Figuratively and literally, they get  _ burnt  _ standing too close to me. People die because they try to help me. People die because they are simply near me. I trust people, and they trust me, and I let them down. I don’t mean to. I try, I try  _ so hard,  _ and it all just slips through my fingers, because  _ I’m not enough _ . Not to keep the people I trust from turning away, from betraying me. Humans are fallible, I’m fallible—me trusting people gets them hurt. It gets me hurt.

“And you’re so hard not to trust, Peter. So very hard.”

Tony closed his eyes in the silence of Peter’s breath, the pause between his heartbeats. 

“It’s just easier this way.”

* * *

_ It’s just easier this way.  _

Tony was watching Peter, staring right at him, but he didn’t really see him. Perhaps Peter was gaping, perhaps he was frowning, perhaps there were tears in the corners of his eyes—Tony didn’t know. All he could see was the broken little boy he’d let down so many times, staring back up at him.

Keeping the boy away for all those months had hurt. More than it had any right to hurt. But it had been the right thing to do—he’d been so  _ sure  _ it was the right thing. 

_ Spare him harm,  _ he’d thought.  _ Don’t bring him down with you. _

How could he have been so wrong?

_ It’s just easier this way.  _

Easier, because if he didn’t expect anything, the boy couldn’t dash those ideas. Easier, because if he didn’t expect anything, Peter wouldn’t expect anything back.

Easier, because if Tony didn’t know his name, the kid couldn’t reach into his core and tear out his heart. Easier, because if Tony hadn’t relied on him for truth, the lies couldn’t hurt as much. Easier, because if Peter didn’t know him, he’d have no reason to keep secrets. Easier, because Tony never wanted to lie broken in a freezing country again. 

Easier, because then Tony couldn’t be left behind.

_ Easier. _

God, how could he be such a  _ coward? _

“I’m sorry,” Tony said, and he meant it. “You didn’t deserve any of it. You don’t deserve it. I don’t deserve—”

“Stop.”

The boy’s voice was soft, too soft, but utterly convicted. Tony forced himself to listen, to keep himself from running. Peter’s hand found his again, pulling it out between them.

“I’ll tell you what you deserve,” Peter began. “You deserve a rest. You deserve whatever future you saw in the Gem. You deserve to smile, and you deserve every tiny blessing the universe has given you. You deserve a team that supports you. You deserve people who love you. Yes, because you’re  _ you,  _ because you’ve done so many great things, but also because you’re  _ human.” _

Tony’s list of mistakes died on his tongue.

“You’re a man. A human. Just like all the rest of us,” Peter said. “I’m sorry I didn’t see it before. I’m sorry I didn’t  _ want  _ to see it before. People are allowed to make mistakes. They’re allowed to hurt other people, and then make up for it. They’re allowed to mourn and cry and be angry and be  _ sad.  _ Sometimes we’re sad all the time. And that’s okay.

“You aren’t an anomaly, Mr. Stark.” Peter smiled. “I know this is probably the first time anyone dared to say it, but you  _ aren’t special.  _ You’re human.”

“Human.”

“Hate to break it to you, but you’re stuck in this insecure spiral like all the rest of us.” Peter grinned brightly.

Tony made a noise that might have been a laugh, or a sob, or the beginning of a protest. It never made it to fruition, however, because with sudden and definitive movements, Peter was hugging him.

It was awkward and slightly uncomfortable in this cramped, curled position beneath the table of the lab. Peter was practically contorting to manage to reach around Tony’s shoulders, but he managed it. 

And it struck Tony completely dumb. 

His hands moved of their own accord, reaching up to wrap tight around Peter’s back, as if that was where they were meant to be. As if that had always been where they were meant to be. The kid relaxed into Tony’s grip, sighing, and Tony may have squeaked. He dropped his cheek against Peter’s hair, shifting to allow the kid to maybe not twist his torso in such an unnatural way, and found his eyes closing, his shoulders relaxing. Peter smelled faintly of mint and shampoo. Tony could distinguish it over the aroma of his greasy lab, and it fit right in.

Peter fit right in. He always had. He slotted into Tony’s life so perfectly, so easily, that it terrified the old, overwhelmed engineer. 

“This is nice,” Peter said, words muffled from where his face was hidden against Tony’s chest.

“I’m an idiot” was Tony’s only reply.

Peter pulled back, and Tony felt a twinge of reluctance to release him, but convinced his arms to let the kid slip out of his embrace. “Yes, yes you are,” Peter declared.

“You’re under this table with me, I’ll have you know,” Tony pointed out. He stretched out his legs with a groan, the pins and needles of extended stillness spidering up his limbs. 

“You started it.”

“You came inside.” 

Peter huffed. “What was I supposed to do, just wait outside the lab and twiddle my thumbs? Never. What sort of s—what kind of person would I be to let you wallow in self pity?”

“A considerate one,” Tony grumbled. “See, now I’m all sappy! When the fuck did you get so wise?”

Peter shrugged, swinging his legs out from under the table and pushing himself into the light. “I’ve been around. Now come on; you need food and coffee; don’t think I can’t tell.”

Tony groaned. “Oh, don’t you start.”

“Come _on_ Mr. Stark, I’m hungry and May said you have to come and get food too, or else she’ll have leftovers.”  
“And that’s bad because…”  
Peter made a face. “Leftovers means we have to eat it again tomorrow.”

“Good! Less work.”

Peter’s grimace deepened. “No. No no no no, you only want to suffer through May’s cooking  _ once.  _ It absolutely does not keep whatsoever.”

Not expecting that answer  _ at all,  _ Tony found himself huffing. He followed Peter out from under the table, unfolding his short form and adjusting his shirt and collar. Peter watched him out of the corner of his eye, rearranging the tools he’d moved aside to lay on the table above Tony. He put them back exactly where they had been, Tony observed with no small amount of pride. 

When they walked out of the workshop, they walked side-by-side. 

And when they faced the sunny December daylight, Tony was smiling. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry I've just,,, really been looking forward to this. :D  
> Hope you enjoyed!


	83. A Proper Sorcerer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Me, missing Stephen: *writes 4k of wizarding* 
> 
> I just REALLY MISSED HIM OKAY

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

The glint of sunlight on the lips of tiny porcelain cups, rows upon rows of them, reflected in Stephen’s face as he dropped his arms, breathing hard. He shifted out of the rays, his pleased smile tilting his chin up into the light. The unfocused energy around him wove and sparked with his movements. He was attuned to it; so much so that he could see it shift from light hues to darker ones where his body moved through it, like bioluminescent plankton in the wake of a deep-sea creature. 

Across the desk, three dozen dainty teacups perched. Each was identical to the last, from their orientation to their patterns to the little chip along the handle where Stephen had shakily positioned the original a little too close to one of the old plates. Copies made of suspended magical energy, Stephen was maintaining an illusion of true, solid porcelain. A siphoned portion of his concentration was reserved for each, excluding the one true teacup.

He could feel the pressure in his mind, like the mental exhaustion after pushing himself to memorize a complicated list, but it didn’t break his smile. The illusions  _ finally  _ looked real. They finally shone in the light, finally cast shadows on the cups around them, finally had the authentic air of something truly old and solid. 

He grinned at the Cloak where it hung in the corner, then turned. “Wong!” Stephen shouted, throwing himself backward to call through the door of the library. “I did it!”

“Took you long enough,” was the grumbled response. 

On his way into Stephen’s room, Wong reached out to silence the music where it chimed quietly out of Stephen’s phone speaker in the corner. Earbuds got testy when too close to Stephen’s magic, but he did have a Bluetooth speaker Wong had figured out how to use. The speaker had been ruled too loud; Wong couldn’t ignore it when he was working in the New York Sanctum as it played the same song over and over and over again. Today’s was Green Day's  _ Boulevard of Broken Dreams— _ a good song, but not something any sane person would want to listen to for hours on end. 

Keyword ‘sane’. 

With its sudden disappearance, Stephen’s room felt empty and silent. He hummed the tune until Wong shot him a glare, then sighed and settled to watch as Wong circled his desk. Wong eyed the teacups with an appraising eye. The man’s own magic reached out to poke at the magic of the ongoing spell, sorting out Stephen’s technique and observing the weaknesses of the enchantment. 

“Good,” he said gruffly. Then he pulled his sleeves up over his wrists and reached out toward one of the cups. Stephen bit his lip, concentrating on maintaining the individuality of each of the illusions as Wong picked up the one on the end, maneuvering it through Stephen’s aura of power.

A few of the others clattered against each other with the transferred motion, despite Stephen’s best efforts. Wong gave him a pointed look. 

“I know, I know,” Stephen grunted, and concentrated on the magic. He severed it, shaped it, until the teacups sat still and individual once again. 

Wong turned the illusion in his hands, squeezing it, threading his finger through the handle and swinging it like a wheel on an axle. He ran his hands over the sharp edges of the chipped ceramics, knocked it against the table to test the reverberation of the sound. He even licked it, and Stephen wrinkled his nose in surprise and confusion.

The cup seemed to pass Wong’s testing, and he nodded, holding it out away from his body. Stephen relaxed, about to move forward to hear the man’s verdict, when Wong opened his grip and dropped the illusion.

Screeching to a halt, Stephen yelped, and the teacup thumped against the hardwood floor. Wong gave him another pointed look. Glaring at him, Stephen bent down to scoop up the object, setting it on the table with its brethren.

“You dropped my spell,” he accused.

“I did,” Wong said. “And it didn’t break.”

“I—”  _ Oh.  _ “Shit.”

“Don’t go beating yourself up.” Wong waved his hand, moving over to stand beside Stephen. “The way things break is always the hardest to notice.” 

“Mm,” Stephen mumbled. “The hardest to remember.”

Wong raised his eyebrow, but didn’t comment, instead reaching for another cup. As he seized one, Stephen raised a shaking hand.

“Not that one,” he said.

Wong peered at him. 

“That’s the original,” Stephen clarified.

“Oh.” Wong looked down at it, his disapproval softening slightly. “I couldn’t tell.”

Stephen took that for the compliment it was, smiling a bit and tucking his hands behind him. The Cloak applauded. Choosing another cup, Wong turned and dropped it once again.

Stephen saw it fall in slow motion, and his vision crackled in a fracturing pattern of light. He saw it crack, saw it shatter, in a thousand different frames as the teacup plummeted. Seizing those images, Stephen’s expression twisted—

And the conjured cup shattered into a thousand spiraling pieces across the study’s floor. 

Stephen blinked, breathing hard, and shook the sudden fog from the edges of his vision. Clapping him on the shoulder, Wong nodded.

“Well done,” the librarian said. “You have to be able to maintain the inanimate copies before you can turn this spell on something sentient, and even on yourself.”

Stephen nodded, letting the spell dissolve with more relief than he’d ever admit. The teacups flickered, than flew inward like some invisible force had knocked them back, each phasing within the original and disappearing. The shattered pieces reformed, then shot upwards as if—

As if someone had rewound time.

Stephen blinked, realizing he’d taken a step back—he was still stepping back. 

“I’m walking down the line,” Stephen hissed, yanking his gaze away from the teacup, still so delicate on the edge of that table. 

“What—” Wong spun, brows furrowed.

“That divides me somewhere in my mind.” Stephen knew better than to close his eyes, than to risk what he’d see in the darkness. He knew better than to stop talking and risk the Words that would drift out against his will. “On the border line of the edge and where I walk alone.”

Wong’s realization was tangible. Almost at the same moment the Cloak whipped over to settle over Stephen’s shoulders, Wong stepped in front of the table, squaring himself before the sorcerer to give him something to focus on. 

“Read between the lines,” the librarian sang softly, matching Stephen’s pitch and tone, “what’s fucked up and everything’s alright.”

_ Today. Today, the 20th of December, 2016. Not yesterday, not the same, a different day, a different life.  _

“Check my vital signs…”

He’d woken up in the kitchen today, in the foyer the day before. He’d eaten Wong’s soup both days, but there’d been no moment of rewind, no opportunity for Stephen’s day to reset. No, he just  _ continued.  _ The world just  _ continued.  _

“... to know I’m still alive, and I walk alone.”

They stood like that, two sorcerers singing in the empty Sanctum, for a long time. Long enough for Stephen to stitch his composure back together, to stand up straight and carve his expression into something strong again. Two voices, one gravelly and tone-deaf, the other low and surprisingly musical, continued through a chorus of acapella words in the silence. 

Stephen stepped back, taking a deep breath. He fiddled with his bandages, tightening knots that didn’t need tightened, and looked anywhere but at Wong.

“You alright?” his friend asked.

“Fine,” Stephen said shortly. 

“Strange.”

“I’m fine, I’m back.” Stephen stepped around the librarian, scooping up the teacup and tucking it with the other three on his bookshelf, awaiting their return to the kitchen. 

“You need to—”

“I’m  _ doing the best I can,  _ Wong,” Stephen snapped. “I haven’t gotten stuck in weeks. I’m here, in the time. I’m doing my duties and the novices have stopped avoiding me. I’m  _ fine.” _

“Strange, you can’t manage more than two hours of sleep at a time, and you have meals so irregularly that I can’t tell how much your eating.”

“I eat!”

“Yeah, five or six times one day, when the next you never even venture into the kitchen.”

“It’s—”

“Avoiding routine, I know.” Wong sighed, moving across the room to sit squarely atop Stephen’s desk “But it’s unhealthy, and you know it.” 

Stephen did know. “But what else is there to do?” he snarled, though the gause of fury wasn’t enough to dissimulate the helplessness driving his words. He wanted to eat regularly, sleep regularly, go through a new day without panicking that he wasn’t living something new at all. But without these mechanisms, these stupid little rituals, he got  _ stuck.  _

And he would do whatever it took to keep from falling back into the loop. Anything. 

“What else is there to do, Wong?”

“Leave.”  
Stephen frowned. “What?”  
“Leave the Sanctum sometimes. You never go anywhere, Strange; not even to Kamar-Taj. You force yourself to change the staples of your life because every day is the same. You avoid healthy routines because you cultivate unhealthy ones, and it doesn’t have to be that way.”

“I have duties,” Stephen objected. “I’m a Master.”

“So am I.”

Stephen growled, but he sat next to Wong anyway, looking down at the wrappings supporting his hands. “Where would I go? What would I  _ do?” _

“Don’t pretend you don’t know.”

Stephen looked at him. “What?”  
“You’ve been avoiding them.”

_ “What?” _

Wong huffed, frustrated, and Stephen thought if he was a little less stoic, the librarian would have slapped him. “There’s a whole team out there, Strange, trying to  _ save the world.  _ To save multiple worlds, from a threat the best this universe has to offer couldn’t stop the first time around. And you’re in here, duplicating teacups.”

Stephen’s lip curled. “I’m here, in the one place I can still call home, doing my multiversal  _ duties as a sorcerer.  _ I don’t avoid what said ‘team’ needs; I answer when they need me, provide the transport they require.”

“We both know how much more you could be doing,” Wong insisted. “We both know you could have brought them halfway across the universe at this point, if you’d put your mind to it.”

Stephen laughed darkly, shaking his head. “Flattered as I am that you consider me  _ that  _ intelligent, it doesn’t matter. They don’t want my help.” 

“Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t give it.”

“No, that’s  _ exactly _ what it means.” Stephen stood, stalking across the room to brace his hands on the windowsill. “I’m not a  _ consultant.  _ I’m not just some… some nameless service that can be used and thrown aside.”

“That’s what you’re making yourself.”

“Not—erg.” Stephen ground his teeth. “I will help them. When they ask. When they realize they need me, as they always do, I will help. But I’m not about to just wander about like I need  _ them _ !”

 “So that’s it then.” Wong shook his head. “Your pride over the universe.”

“It’s not—”

Maybe it was. Stephen hardly cared at this point.

“They don’t want my help,” he repeated. “They need it, but when I come, they don’t want what I can provide. So they take what they need and nothing more, and they give me  _ nothing  _ in return. No information, no updates. If they aren’t going to supply anything, neither will I.”

Wong looked at him, expression unreadable.

“I’m trying to help. But half of them don’t know me, and the rest think I’m the enemy, whether they can control it or not.”

“You want to be part of their team.”

“What?” Stephen stared at the man. “No, I don’t.”

“You do. The only way you’ll belong in this quest of yours, Stephen, is if you  _ embark on it.  _ You say you’re not a consultant? Then actively pursue answers. You say you’re not some nameless service? Then let them know its you who provides them. You want to save this universe.  _ Let  _ yourself.”

“Do you not  _ hear me?”  _ Stephen snapped. “I will help them! I am helping them!”

“Not enough.”

“Anything I do is too much for him!”

Wong smirked. 

And Stephen slammed back into his body with the sinking feeling of someone who’d just given too much away.

“Who?”

Stephen growled, backed into a corner. There was nothing to do but explain, so Stephen sighed and bit out, “The magic—it hurts Stark. He’s post-traumatic, I can tell.”  _ I am, too.  _ “And I’m a trigger for him; my skills and my contributions are detriment to his mental health.”

“You’re not his doctor.”

“So what? I’m  _ a  _ doctor. And I know what it feels like to be trapped in the loop of painful memories—” he chose his words specifically, watching Wong wince— “and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Even Stark.”

“Strange—”

“Enough, Wong. They’ll approach me on their terms. And for now, I’ll keep  _ defending this reality  _ in my own Sanctum.”

They stared at each other; Wong as stony and disapproving as ever, Stephen breathing hard with irrational fury, irrational  _ frustration,  _ at the situation he’d gotten himself into. This conversation, this mission, this  _ life— _ how had he managed to do this to himself? __

And as though waiting for its cue, Stephen’s phone took that exact moment to ring. 

Shaken out of their staring contest, Wong and Stephen glanced across the desk to where the phone was lying. Stephen trotted over to it, flipping it over to read the contact before he even considered answering.

He closed his eyes. 

_ Of course. _

“Not a word,” he told Wong, before fumbling at the phone screen until he managed to answer the call.

“Stark,” he said shortly, and Wong snorted. Stephen flipped the librarian off. 

“Strange,” the other man replied, just as snappishly. “Get over here, would you? I have an idea.”

“Oh?”

“It involves you actually doing something useful for once,” Stark said, and Stephen was suddenly  _ very  _ thankful that Wong couldn’t hear what was transpiring. 

“Shocking,” Stephen drawled, his sarcasm oozing into his aura and turning it a rusty brown. 

“I know,  _ gasp. _ We’re in the lab; if you aren’t here in three seconds I’m starting without you.” And with that, the man hung up.

Stephen lowered the phone with a sigh, reaching for his sling-ring. “I have to go,” he said to Wong, who was already leaving the room.

“Sure, Strange,” the man purred. “Go save the world—but only as much as is specifically asked of you because Vishanti forbid you show another person that you’re an actual feeling human-being.”

“Fuck you, Wong.”

But the man was already gone, and no reply greeted Stephen’s furious words.

It was likely an atrociously bad plan to go skipping into the Compound already angry, but Stephen swept his arm through the air anyway. It took two tries to manage the portal; Stephen couldn’t quite concentrate. But before long, he and the Cloak were striding out onto the floor of Stark’s lab, its inhabitants glancing up upon his arrival. 

“Hey, asshole,” Stark said by way of greeting. “You’re eight seconds late.”

“My  _ deepest  _ apologies,” Stephen growled. He snapped the portal shut with perhaps more aggression than necessary and didn’t come any closer.

“Why is he here?” That from Loki, who was lurking moodily behind Stark.

“Because he’s magic, and we need to cover all our bases.” Shuri’s voice crackled through the audio from where she was projected atop one of the tables, leaning forward in her Wakandan chair to smirk at them. 

Stark and Shuri—this was about the space ship, then.

“I’m magic,” Loki huffed. “A proper sorcerer. He’s under the impression he’s some kind of—”

“Oh shut  _ up  _ you half-wit fuck of a space reject,” Stephen snapped. “I’d be more than happy to remove each of your limbs from your body and shove them up your ass the  _ moment  _ you decide you’re capable of enough courage to confront me without a fifteen year old to protect you.”

A pause.

Quietly, Shuri whispered, “ooooh, burn.”

But Loki was standing—on the  _ table,  _ no less, knives manifesting in both of his hands as he practically hissed at Stephen. “You want to see just how far my  _ confrontation  _ can go?” the Asgardian growled, his tone lifting the hairs on the back of Stephen’s neck and sending the Cloak flaring in defense. 

“Oh, I do,” Stephen replied with silken, dangerous sweetness. “Just try it. I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

But before Loki could lunge, before Stephen could crack into the roiling  _ sea  _ of frustration that churned in his gut, Stark was stepping between them. Metal was folding over his hands, the gauntlets of his suit manifesting like Loki’s knives, and he pointed each directly at the offending sorcerers. Stephen didn’t even look at him, keeping his eyes on Loki. He kept his smile condescending, provocative, practically reveling in the fury that built on the Asgardian’s face.

“Stop it!” Stark ordered, the weapons in his hands whirring with power. “Loki, sit your ass down or I will not hesitate to banish you to Peter’s room as I figure out how to save the world.”

Loki snarled.

“Don’t even  _ start,  _ young man,” Stark snarled right back, and Loki startled.

Stark rolled his eyes. “Yeah, you’re a thousand years old; act your fucking age. I invited you here for a discussion on the physics of space travel, not a wizard-on-wizard brawl in my lab. Play nice, or I’m sending you both back to whatever astral plane you originate from!”  
“I don’t—” Loki began, but Stark’s repulsor just whirred louder. 

“Don’t. Try me.”

And to Stephen’s utter shock, Loki bowed his head, slinking backward off the table to curl up in his chair. Stark nodded, dropping his left arm, before turning to look at Stephen.

“And you—”

Stephen wasn’t having it.

“No need for the lecture,” he sighed. “I come, I do what you ask, I leave. Let me know if anything changes.”

Stark nodded sharply. “Now that we’re all on the same page, can we please talk about lightspeed travel and quantum warping like normal, civilized people?”

Shuri whined. “Aw, but I wanted to see the wizards fight, Mr. Stark.”

“Don’t you start,” Stark groaned, pinching the bridge of his nose. 

“I was betting on you, Strange, just in case anyone was wondering—”

“Shuri!”

The girl raised her hand, her laughter fuzzing through the speaker. “Fine fine, I’m being quiet. What’s the issue?”

“The issue is that I’m not going to be able to break physics in a reasonable time-frame to get us across the universe and seeking Infinity Stones,” Stark explained, ambling back to his chair. “So I think it’s time to start discussing your influence.”

“On the spaceship?” Stephen asked.

“Of course on the spaceship!” Loki sneered. “What else would he be referring to?”

Stephen gave the Asgardian a very complicated, very lengthy series of eldritch hand motions, stopping in the middle-finger just before he carried out the final gesture of the curse. “I will hex you.”

“I’d like to see you—”

“Shut it!” Stark thundered.

The bickering wizards did as they were ordered.

“Do either of you have the capability to power a machine that can constantly warp space, compressing the vacuum in a specific field while expanding the vacuum behind it, and can be controlled by something non-magical in an emergency situation?”

“Yes,” said Loki and Stephen simultaneously.

Stark opened his mouth. Closed it again. Frowned. 

“... yes?”

“Yes.”

“That’s it? No musing, not theorizing, no diagrams or doubt? Just yes?” Stark raised his eyebrows.

Stephen shrugged. “Unnecessary. I’d simply imbue the object with the power necessary—like a relic, except without the unsustainable human power.”

“Pft,” Loki scoffed. “All that would be required would be a quantum manipulation of the area with the engine as the channel. Hook it up with your wires and your switches and your circuitry; a warp core would act the same as any other engine.”

Stephen’s curiosity squabbled with his pride and anger for a moment, before finally winning out. “You could sustain a spell that long? But allow the transfer between dimensional energy and electricity in normal earthen technology?”

“My magic is not dimensional. I’ve told you before,” Loki said. 

“But where does it come from? You have to draw power from  _ somewhere.” _

“I do.” Loki smirked. “It comes from the movement of our world, the little edges that make the universe and give each of us our forms. I can push it. Change it.”

“It’s all… particle manipulation?” That from Shuri, who was leaning forward, eyes wide with interest.

“It’s the form of the universe,” Loki said. “We’re all part of the universe. The nothingness of space is part of it. I just change the nature of the matter or the lack-thereof to shift its location or its makeup, just like Stark shifts the energy of the spark to the energy of the light.”

“Fascinating,” Stephen said before he could stop himself.

Loki looked at him. “And you? How do you manage it?” 

“I… I pull power from specific locations in the multiverse. Our universes are three-dimensional, where the multiverse has four dimensions; think of those dimensions like axies. Of course, I say dimensions here meaning length and width and so-on, not the bubble universes that make up the multiverse.”

“Right,” Stark said, leaning forward.

“I pull power from these tiers,” Stephen continued, “and the energy retains the properties of the place, time, and form it was pulled from, thus providing me with a specific magic with which to cast a spell.”

“Can you draw it from the Stalk?” Shuri asked.

Stephen nodded. “I could, though it would be too similar in multiversal location to really give me any power. The coordinates of the time-axis would be identical.”

“Hm.”

“And you can use this power on a machine? Imbue it, you said?” Loki pressed.

“I can. It would maintain the manipulation of that specific energy signature no matter my situation. Just like the Cloak would keep ticking on even if I died.”

Unless it chose not to—to burn and sever and die with him, hundreds and hundreds of times before Dormammu’s might.

Loki hummed. “I would have to keep the spell tethered constantly. If I lost power or life, it would sever the engine’s capabilities.”

Stark nodded. “I would, of course, try to avoid your dying, Loki. But I would prefer a machine that doesn’t operate purely on the situation of it’s creator?”

“Of course.”

 “I can’t link the created relic to the rest of the ship’s operation, however,” Stephen clarified. “If we could pair Loki’s ability to manipulate the nature of those objects to make them compatible with my eldritch enchantment—”

“The engine would be almost completely mechanized,” Loki finished. “As natural as the rest of your tech.”

In the silence that followed the two sorcerer’s declarations, Stark and Shuri shared a long look. Stephen watched Loki as the engineers commenced their telepathic analysis, trying to decide just how angry he still was. It seemed Loki was doing the same, appraising him with narrowed eyes.

Stephen very much wanted to fight the Asgardian. Though not because he was angry; simply because he wasn’t sure if he could win. 

“Alright then,” Stark said. “I’m days away from getting the clear to work openly with Wakanda; this won’t take too long.” He turned to them “That’s… unbelievably helpful.”

“You’re welcome,” Stephen purred, smirking innocently. 

“Don’t push it.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it.”

Stark rolled his eyes. “Well, then. Let’s get to work.” 

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Some magical theory for y'all! More of that on its way, but not quite yet. :) 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	84. This is my Hope

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Happy holidays, if you celebrate something around this time! Hope you and yours are having a happy and healthy week. <3
> 
> Quite proud of this chapter, not gonna lie. Hope you enjoy! 
> 
> (PS I timed this perfectly, wouldn't you say? XD)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Peter woke up on the 22nd of December with the sound of strings in his ears. 

He blinked open his eyes, shaking his head to banish the last whispers of his dream from his mind, but the strings remained. Plucking notes spidered out through the halls, crawling beneath the crack of Peter’s door, dancing and swirling together on the floor of his room. They were jejune, almost clumsy, but Peter swore he heard autumn leaves beneath them, swore he heard the swirling of snowy flurries, the unfurling of spring petals, the rattle of aspen bark. 

Shoving himself from his bed, Peter didn’t bother to slip out of his pajamas as he cracked open his door. He peered curiously out into the hallway as if he could chase the repetitive notes, the plain but captivating melody. 

The 22nd of December, and six men and woman, unseen by each other, padded through a dark building, following the unspooling of the music. Like wolves from dens, like the sun peaking over the horizon, they moved together in the soft sound of strings.

The 22nd of December, and a young Norse god plucked six notes on a makeshift instrument of wood and wire.

The 22nd of December, and eight beings found themselves in the arching ballroom of the Compound, surrounded by the echo of music. 

The 22nd of December, and the holiday of light had begun.

Peter blinked as he stepped into the dim, orange glow of the hall, and for a moment, he could have sworn the walls were made of wood and stone and not the sleek, painted steel and drywall of the Compound. He could have sworn there were flames in the gas fireplace. He could have sworn the shadows of leaves and thousands of spirits fell across his face and across the floor. 

He blinked again. 

In the four doorways, he saw the others, eyes still hazy with sleep and confusion. Rhodes was struck still, captivated, and Happy and May were left trying to peer around his immobile form. To Peter’s left, Pepper swayed slightly as she entered through a different corridor, gaze spinning wide around the room. Vision stood in one corner, casting shadows in the orange light. Tony crept in from the opposite side, his head cocked, his eyes flashing with interest. He looked sharp, excited, and Peter figured he hadn’t been asleep when the notes began their spiral.

And in the middle of the room, sitting curled in the center of the conference table, Loki sat, glowing with magic, and played music none of them could resist.

As if noticing them for the first time, Loki’s tune took one last circle of it’s repeated melody and stopped. The last note faded into the dimness of the room like candle smoke. 

“Welcome,” the Asgardian said, with a voice he’d borrowed from every creature he’d ever copied, every being he’d ever spoken to. “The time of Jul has begun.”

Peter stumbled forward, turning in a wide circle in the ballroom. He could smell magic, smell light, flickering off every candle, beaming down from the half-covered phosphorescents in the ceiling. Snow crunched beneath his feet, but when he looked down, there was only the lush carpet of the room he was so used to. But in the corner of his eye, like an optical illusion you couldn’t look directly towards, he thought he saw dry grass and frosted logs. He thought he heard the crackle of wood and the hum of a thousand ancient worlds. 

He had to be dreaming, still.

“Loki?” he called, taking another step forward.

His brother in arms turned, setting down his instrument and standing. The Asgardian’s footsteps were loud on the  conference table, and he spun to face all of them at once.

“It was brought to my attention,” he began, “that you humans don’t honor the realms and the dance of the light. Not in the way I know, at least.” The candles, both real and magical illusions, flickered along with his words. “And though you are not of Asgard, nor are all of you my kin—” he glanced at Peter— “you are my companions in this universe.

“Jul is a time of celebration. It begins now, and I wished to call you to see it. FRIDAY?”

Surprised, Peter glanced up; he hadn’t known that FRIDAY and Loki communicated, let alone schemed together. But the AI’s voice responded with something like joy as she said, “ready.”

And then the Compound peeled apart; the great bay windows that Tony had worked into every room and onto every story uncovering. Their blinds fell away as the lightbulbs dimmed, and Loki dropped his hands to send the glow of his candles to a flicker.

Just as he did, as if he’d been counting the seconds, the first streaks of light burst across the sky. 

“The sun’s coming back,” Peter realized. “It’s the day after the solstice. The longest night of the year has ended.”

Loki nodded, leaping down from the table with a quiet thump. His gaze flashing in the dark, he moved around to face them, beckoning them closer. Padding up next to him, Vision tapped the table and explained, “Loki and I have been working for a couple of weeks to prepare for Jul. It brings hope, celebrates light and life, and we thought…”

“We thought this coming year might need that,” Loki finished.

There was silence from the humans in the room, silence as they still breathed in the ethereal atmosphere and tried to pull themselves out of their disbelief, out of their awe. A holiday. All of them together, celebrating the cold season.

Peter had to be dreaming.

“Thank you.” Pepper was the first person to speak. “I think the year will need that. And I think—” she looked around at each of them— “that we deserve it.”

“Yeah,” Rhodes said, “but did you have to start it at the ass-crack of dawn?”

Peter laughed, and it broke the spellcast tension of the room. People smiled, began to spread throughout the ballroom to investigate the lights and illusions. May stood next to Peter, looking up through the ceiling windows to where the sky was slowly lightening, and Tony pulled Rhodes over to the center table. 

“How did you make this?” he asked, holding up Loki’s little lyre.

The Asgardian shrugged. “The android lent his knowledge. I have discovered much about harmonics.”

“Hm.” Tony turned the instrument in his hands, sliding his palm into the base. He plucked at one of the strings, and the spidering note wound out through the hall once more. It was significantly quieter than the music that had drawn them here.

“The volume?”

“Magic.”

“Ah,” Tony said with a nod. He set the instrument down. “How much of this is magic?”

How much of the celebration built from nothing by two non-humans to bring them together in the darkest part of the year? How much of the aimless moment where all of them were together, separate of any crisis, and could just  _ be?  _ How much was magic?

“All of it,” Peter murmured, closing his eyes and breathing in. “All of it is magic.”

* * *

Loki led all seven of them into the kitchen when the sun had risen completely and the exhaustion had worn off their frames. Walking next to Peter, who wore the softest smile he had ever seen, Tony had to remember to blink.

He was honestly and unarguably completely confused at this point. 

Yesterday—well, two days ago, now—Tony had been building a multipower warp engine from the combined magic of two sorcerers. Two days ago, he’d poured all of his concentration into getting them to space, and the need to be diagraming something twitched at his fingers even now. Two days ago, he’d been stopping Loki from gutting—or being gutted by—another wizard. 

Loki, who was now handing each of them a breakfast plate and leading them to the island counter of the kitchen. Loki, who had assembled all of those lopsided, somewhat awkward, but utterly delicious open-faced sandwiches by hand. Loki, Prince of Lies, God of Mischief, who wanted to bring their mission good luck. Who wanted to  _ celebrate  _ that luck, celebrate this memory of his home and his people, with all of them.

Tony had to be dreaming. 

Remembering to blink, Tony took an excessively large bite of his sandwich. He mumbled around the crunchy bread and tangy peppers, “so Peter.”

“Yeah?” Peter was picking at his own sandwich, organizing the toppings so they were evenly distributed.

“Well. What the fuck?”

Peter laughed, chucking Tony in the shoulder and biting into his food. That little smile hadn’t disappeared. “I don’t know, Mr. Stark. But I think it’s wonderful.”

“Hm.”  
“May and I always celebrate Christmas in the apartment. We have a plastic tree, but it looks really real. I make snickerdoodles, but I always make too many, cuz there aren’t… well, there’s only two of us, y’know?”

Tony nodded slowly.

“This is nice though.” Peter munched on his sandwich, not lifting his eyes from his plate. “I thought maybe we’d do something for the holiday, but I didn’t even imagine…” 

“Something like this?”

“Yeah,” Peter said, looking up. They watched the room together, Loki and Vision finally eating after everyone else had taken food, May and Happy lingering together by the sink, Rhodey and Pepper pulling the others together into conversation with that golden social ease they always seemed to possess.

“Oh, I uh, I should have asked if you celebrate anything,” Peter hastily added. “I didn’t mean to be rude.”

Tony shrugged. “It’s fine, don’t worry. I’m atheist, but we celebrate Christmas somewhat casually. Just as a tradition thing. Cap’s always far more intent than the rest of us, of course, though Sam’s singing voice is  _ tremendous  _ when it came to caroling. You should see the brawls for the cookies; Steve’s glower is impressive—”

Tony cut himself off.

“Or, well. It was,” he finished awkwardly. 

Taking another bite from his sandwich to hide the sudden lump in his throat, Tony looked away. He hadn’t… he hadn’t thought about that. That he’d maybe never hear Sam’s rendition of  _ Silent Night  _ again. That maybe he and Natasha wouldn’t drink their hot chocolate perched on the edge of this very counter, watching the others fight over who got to string the lights on the tree, ever again. That maybe Steve wouldn’t ever laugh at the way they twisted the traditions each year again.

That maybe he’d lost all that. Forever.

Peter’s hand was on his shoulder, rubbing softly, and Tony blinked. The world swirled back into focus, and he started slightly, knocking his sandwich askew. 

“I’m sorry,” Peter said. 

“Don’t be.”

“No, I am. You lost something, something important, and that hurts.”

Tony huffed, shaking his head. “Good riddance to them.” 

“You miss them.” 

Tony sighed. “I miss… I miss the idea of them. I miss having people I trusted. And I thought they trusted me. I was wrong about that.”

“Oh.”

Tony took another bite. “Yeah.”

“What are you gonna…” Peter trailed off.

“What am I going to say when we inevitably have to confront them? Still working on that.” Tony gave a rueful chuckle. 

Peter didn’t reply, and they lapsed back into silence. A belt of laughter chorused from Rhodey at some word neither of them had heard. May raised her voice to compliment Loki on the breakfast, and Loki snarked something back that had Peter rolling his eyes fondly. 

It was such a strange, easy image: all of them crowded around the kitchen, mingling in flavors and stories old and current. Tony thought if he concentrated, if he closed his eyes, he could still hear that lilting music calling him from his workshop. The music that had come from Loki and so much more.

What stories had Thor always told? Of the realms, of the universe stretching blossoming tree branches around the worlds of sentience and sorrow? 

Tony cast his eyes toward the window above the sink, looking out across the Atlantic to where the sky had turned blue and the sun was electrifying the waves. Between one breath and the next, he saw through it—saw to golden skies, frozen hilltops, firey wastelands, and darkened landscapes rimmed in sickly light. 

He knew, with soft certainty, that he belonged in none but this world, his feet planted upon the Compound floor, and his… his family around him.

“Don’t be sorry,” Tony murmured. “If I was celebrating with them, then you wouldn’t be here. And that’s not something to regret.”

* * *

Loki could see them realizing.

He watched it happen as the hours slipped by, through midday and the afternoon, through the snow that began to fall at the turn of the evening. He watched barriers fall, watched walls and defenses slip away, watched these figures become  _ people.  _ People around each other, unhidden and unmasked. 

It was like watching the sunrise. And it was worth everything. 

By midday, more voices had arrived, excited and cynical and everywhere in between. MJ and Ned were welcome additions to their growing celebration—Loki and Vision had made  _ far  _ too much food. 

It tasted different, of course it did. But the flavor still brought Loki back, still had him remembering when he’d stolen sweetbread for himself and Thor before the games. It reminded him of the smile of his mother as they ate pork pie on the stands around the Hearth. It tasted of home. 

Loki remembered the Jul games, the competitions and the races. He remembered Thor in the ring, remembered facing his brother himself in playful combat. Jul had always been a time when they forgot, when they stepped away from the palace and into the streets, no longer princes but brothers on a boisterous holiday. It had been the one time when they agreed without words to set aside the jealousy, the rivalry, and  _ live.  _

It had been the one time when Loki felt at home in Asgard.

It made so much sense now, he supposed. But his blood had nothing to do with it, as was proven in the utter contentment that ran rampant through the Compound as the Avengers did exactly as he had done for all those years. They hung up cloaks, suits, weapons, and just laughed. Loved.  _ Lived.  _

Even the cruel liar, the prince of trickery, could see the beauty there. Could be proud of his role in creating it. 

There were no sparring matches in the Compound this day. No races, no feats of strength or realm-known musicians. But there were games, which were new to Loki and new to many others, taught by Peter and Stark and Vision and played around low tables with cards and coins and little wooden playing pieces. Loki lost all but one—a bizarre and simple game referred to as ‘BS’. 

When the moon had finally begun to rise over the trees in the East, Loki stood. The people around him looked up—their stomachs were full and their minds were content, and Loki could think of no better time to ask them for their purest wishes. 

“Follow me,” he said. 

Frigid snow and crackling grass met his bare feet as he stepped outside the Compound, breath fogging before him. The stars lit the darkened land in eerie light, and Loki’s shadow was cast long by the backlight from the glowing Compound. He didn’t have to turn to know when Vision floated down to his side, toes brushing the very tops of the grass. He didn’t have to turn to know when the Midgardians turned their gazes to the sky.

“It is a tradition on Asgard,” he began, “for the people of the city to give voice to their hopes for the coming year. They are burned with the Log, used as fuel for the sun’s returning fire, but that is not the purpose of the tradition. It will do us the same to just think them here. Yggdrasil spreads its branches through Midgard despite your rather… petty natures.”

Rhodes chuckled, and it was crisp as the snow. Loki gave him a glinting grin in return. 

“They need not be spoken,” he continued, “though I believe mine should be. You must hear it, along with Yggdrasil.”

An anticipatory silence followed his words. Loki, ever conscious of the dramatic effect, let it build for a moment. 

“I hope,” he began, and turned to face the companions around him, “that in the coming year, you forgive me. That you recognize that I have changed, but also that I am still the same, and you forgive me all the same.”

He blinked, his eyes finding Stark’s in the dark, cold air. 

“I hope you know that I intended to hurt you, in the tower and on this Earth those years ago. I did hurt you. And I hope you realize that I will  _ never,  _ not as long as there is still life in my breast and sanity in my mind, intend to hurt you again.”

Stark’s gaze flickered.

“My knives fight alongside you, now.” Loki’s voice had lowered, the words for Stark and Stark alone. “And I hope that you can remember my magic, someday, as fighting alongside you as well.”

Silence. Crystal silence in the snowy night as the stars rang with Loki’s words.

“That is my hope, bid Yggdrasil take it.” Loki turned. “What other hopes do we bind for January?”

* * *

Peter spoke before he realized it.

“I have one,” he said, and the gazes of nine friends and family members turned to beckon him forward. 

Peter swallowed, turning his gaze up toward the sky. 

“I hope that this year will give us more than it takes. And if it doesn’t, I hope we learn from what was taken. I hope we remember the things that are and will be lost, but also that we focus on what we find.”

Beside him, Tony Stark was close enough that Peter could hear the pattern of his breathing. The moonlight glinted off the dark skin of MJ’s profile as she turned her gaze into the frozen horizon. Loki wasn’t smiling, and somehow that expression was truer than any grin could have been.

“This is my hope,” Peter whispered. “Bid Yggdrasil take it.”

* * *

Sam’s carols and Cap’s cookies, Nat’s crafts and Clint’s jokes. Bruce’s mumble and Wanda’s gifts. 

Vision’s food. Rhodey’s stories. Pepper’s smile. 

“I hope that I will never miss these moments. I hope I never look back at this day with anything beyond fondness. I hope there is no regret for this, no mourning; only the joy of a day I will see again.”

Tony’s ears were frigid, but his fingers were warm when Peter took his hand. 

“This is my hope, bid Yggdrasil take it.”

* * *

“I hope I make it home, wherever that happens to be,” MJ whispered.

* * *

_ I hope this lasts,  _ Happy thought.

* * *

“I hope I find my future. I hope it means something, something for me.” Ned looked at the ground as he spoke, but his words were clear.

* * *

“I hope I know what to do,” Rhodey admitted. “I hope I can still be strong.”

* * *

Vision tapped his forehead where the light no longer shone.  _ I hope I won’t have to hide her forever. _

* * *

“I hope the year brings confidence,” Pepper declared. “I hope I can watch a spaceship fly to the stars and know that it will return.”

* * *

“I hope I can let him fly away,” May murmured as she looked toward her Peter, so quietly that no one heard.

* * *

“This is my hope, bid Yggdrasil take it.”

* * *

  
  
  
  
  


 

In an empty, silent Sanctum, Stephen Strange rewrapped his bandages and slipped away to bed. 

 

 


	85. Taste in Paintings

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

“Hail the conquering hero!” Tony announced as he burst through the doors into the lounge, following FRIDAY’s direction. The hinges screamed, and the doors slammed against the walls with deafening  _ booms  _ to highlight his success. “That’s me, by the way.”

Peter, who had jumped halfway to the roof with surprise at the noise, shot him a somewhat twisted look of interest and annoyance. Sitting at the low coffee table, the boy had spread his suit out across the surface and was fiddling with one of the web-shooters. Loki, across the table, had his knees pulled to his chest as he stared intently at something small resting against them. 

Tony could have interrogated them for what they were doing, but it didn’t seem of express importance. Glowing with triumph, he spun across the room to lean against the reclining chair, his grin crackling across his face. 

“Well? Aren’t you gonna ask?” he prodded.

Peter rolled his eyes. “What happened, then?”

“I,” Tony began, raising his arms into the air, “have just received an official statement from  _ all  _ involved parties that I, Tony Stark, Iron Man, have permission to break Wakanda’s borders and land in their airspace.”

Peter’s annoyance disappeared in a flurry of excitement. He was on his feet in half a moment. “That’s so awesome Mr. Stark! When are we getting tickets?”

“Tickets?” Tony scoffed. “Young Parker, you forget who I am.”

“Oh? I assume Wakanda will send a retrieval unit to give us transportation.” Loki looked up. 

“What are you doing over there?” Tony demanded.

“He’s watching cat videos,” Peter said dismissively. “Please don’t ask.” Then, in a whisper, the boy added, “it’s your fault.”

“They’re  _ cat videos, _ ” huffed Tony. 

“You’ve doomed us all.”

“ _ Anyway _ —” Tony rolled his eyes— “I will be flying my own way to Wakanda. The king trusts me enough for that.”

“Awesome… same plane, like we flew to Germany?”

“Yes, but without the you this time.”

Peter’s face fell. “What? Why?”

“Well, because I won’t be there all that long, and it’s a twelve hour flight—down from sixteen in my super fancy private quinjet. Also because I didn’t get permission for Loki of Asgard or a minor-slash-superhero; just me and Happy, if he wants to join me, though I think he’s busy.”

“Oh.”

“Don’t be disappointed.” Tony clapped the boy on the shoulder. “You’ll be spending all your time there come January. And besides, I have something I need you two to do while I’m gone. It’s not as cool as politics in the greatest city in the world—” Peter’s mouth opened, and Tony realized his mistake. 

“Don’t even start,” he warned. “I don’t need  _ Hamilton  _ in the middle of my debriefing.”

“Aw.”  
“Maybe later.”

“Yay!”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Anyway. I want you and Loki and whoever else wants to get involved to start in on our space game. Chart us our course—figuratively, of course. Where’s our first destination? When do we have to get there? What about the timelines of other individuals that we know of and should disrupt as little as possible?” 

“Well—” Loki looked up again.

“Not now. Or, yeah, now, whatever. But that’s what you guys have got to block out while I’m gone.”

“When will we be lifting off?” Peter asked.

Tony shrugged, hands wringing with equal parts excitement and nervousness. “Very soon, I hope. I’m bringing the warp core with me, and Shuri and I will design the craft and subjugate the building responsibilities between here and there. I’ll probably end up with most of the coding work, and her team with the hard assembly, but who knows.”

“Awesome…”

“You can help with that part,” Tony assured. “Your Ned friend too, if he’s as good with code as you say.”

“Until January, of course.”

“Right. When do you go?”

“The ninth.”

“Oh good; one more week of you here.”

Peter grinned. “You won’t be getting ride of me  _ too  _ soon.” 

“No I won’t.” Tony moved over to sit behind the boy, sprawling out on the couch and observing the table. “But in the meantime… what’s up with your suit?”

  
  


Usually, Tony Stark’s private jet was something to behold. Sleek and personally designed for optimal aerodynamics and flashiness, Tony matched it perfectly as he usually appeared, clad in a streamlined suit and a mien you couldn’t look away from. Usually, people knew of his coming, and some crowded around his wake to try and catch a glimpse of the celebrity—or the infamous notoriety. Usually, Tony Stark arrived in style and stayed there.

Usually. 

The jet touched down on the sprawling pad across one tier of the palace, looking like a goose in a murder of ravens. Tony skipped off the stairwell, eyes dazzled by the steel and the glass and the vibranium, and had to grin at just how antique his world-class vehicle looked here.

Deep in December in the northern hemisphere, the summer was at its apex here in Africa. It felt freeing to come under his own power, no dependency or reliance—give or take twelve hours of inconvenience, of course. Leaving in the middle of the night, Tony arrived in Wakanda in the early afternoon the next day. 

But damn, had it been a trip. 

“Woah,” Tony breathed, unable to contain his somewhat childish awe as he peered around the plane to the skyline of the city. _ “Woah.” _

He didn’t have much time to goggle, however; they were waiting for him. Three elegant individuals were standing at the foot of the landing pad. Two of them, Tony could identify. He waved to the king and his sister, spinning to indicate the entirety of this beautiful, impossible world. 

“That dome of yours?” Tony began. “It’s brilliant. Makes for a damn dramatic reveal, and an even more dramatic approach—does it flicker inside when someone breeches the edge? How does it block satellite penetration?”

“Mr. Stark,” greeted T’Challa, ignoring Tony’s babbling tirade. “Welcome to Wakanda.”

“Officially this time,” Tony said, winking. T’Challa’s smile may have shifted in amusement, but it retained its somewhat lofty, official atmosphere. Tony didn’t envy the guy; at least when Tony himself had to keep his public mask, it was something  _ fun.  _

“Your bird looks heavy,” Shrui observed from behind her brother, stepping around him to peer at the jet.

Tony spun toward her. “Yeah. State of the art in the rest of the world, but you guys here have a far different taste in paintings.”

“That we do.” Shuri grinned.

“Good to see you,” Tony said, turning to T’Challa and holding out his hand. His eyes flickered to the woman next to him—specifically her piercing gaze and  _ gargantuan  _ spear. “I trust the princess told you of our predicament?”

“She did,” T’Challa sighed, relaxing slightly as he shook Tony’s hand. “Let us retire inside before we discuss it further.”

“Sounds good!” Tony chirped. 

Shuri fell back to walk beside Tony as they folded themselves through the windows of the palace, watching him as he drank in everything he could about the place. He could sense the electrifying potential of vibranium beneath his every step, and it sent surges of quixotic ideas swirling though his mind. The floor seemed almost completely sound absorbent as his feet connected rhythmically to its surface, but the voices of the king and his companions were loud and clear, and Tony turned his head to try to distinguish the directory of the harmonics. 

“Like it?” Shuri asked.

“Like it? This place is my dream come true! With a healthy dose of  _ actual heaven  _ sprinkled over it, just for my express enjoyment!” Tony spun around himself, arms raising in the centrifugal force, and grinned.

“It’s not as recent as most of the buildings in the city, obviously,” Shuri explained. “But we’ve renovated with the generations. I can show you some of the ancient parts; they aren’t so different from your world.”

Enthusiastically, Tony hummed. “Consider me impressed, intrigued, and inspired.”

“Appreciative, adaptive, and arrogant?”

Tony grinned. “Optimistic, obliging, and opportunistic.”

“Excited—”

“Oh please  _ stop,”  _ sighed the woman with the spear. 

“Oh c’mon Okoye, it’s English alphabet practice! Vocab!” Shuri clapped her hands, lacing her fingers together. “I see great games in our future.” 

Before either of them could pursue the idea, however, T’Challa had lead them out into the sprawling, circular room that Tony knew instantly was a center of politics. He didn’t want to call it a throne room, though there was a throne—it looked more like a place of council than a symbol of hierarchy. The empty room carried their voices and breaths in an acoustically perfect dome, and Tony felt his gait caught into the flow of the pattern of glass panes on the floor. 

“You know how to speak in  _ style, _ ” Tony said.

“It is a ceremonial place, but also one of awe,” T’Challa agreed. “It is meant to be powerful, but also welcoming.”

Tony whistled. “I’m certainly feeling the power.”

“Exactly; I’m the welcoming part,” Shuri purred.

“Shuri…”

The girl just laughed, trotting over to perch on the edge of one of the chairs. Benches? Stools? Tony wasn’t sure; whatever they were, they looked comfortable. 

Glancing at the other woman—Okoye, and then at T’Challa, Tony gathered permission to sit and sidled over to a chairs himself. T’Challa took his seat at the front, and though Tony half-expected the warrior woman to stand at his side, she sat as well. The spear was placed carefully on the ground beside her. Tony had no doubt she could get it from there into her hand in less than six milliseconds. 

“Alright,” T’Challa began, leaning forward onto his knees. “It is good to finally speak to you about what faces us, Mr. Stark.”

“Yes, agreed. Though I do appreciate all your help—both with Vision and also with the kids. Getting them permission to come here has cleared up way more than I ever would have thought.”

“I am glad.” T’Challa smiled. “Obviously, we have never had children from other countries reside here, so I am interested in what knowledge and culture they will bring us.”

Tony snorted, imagining Ned and MJ and Peter—for however long Tony could manage to keep him here and safe—gallivanting through this city, being too smart for their own good and utterly irreverent. Part of him cringed, and the other part thought they might be just what this country needed in its quest for integration with the rest of the world. Three kids, a princess, and too many memes for anyone to breathe. “Oh, it’ll sure be interesting.”

“The most pressing matter is, of course, the Infinity Stones,” T’Challa continued. His face didn’t change, but Tony could see the frown dust his features. “It is my understanding that you have three?”

“Two and a half,” Tony clarified.

“Ah.”

Before long, Tony was standing, pacing around the circle of chairs as he explained their entire situation. He kept in as many details as he could, and Shuri contributed where his mind wandered to solutions instead of explanations of the problems. He spoke of the Gem, the Stalk and the Leaf, his travels into the astral plane—abbreviated, of course—the magical warp core that sat complete and functional in his workshop, and the ever-dwindling timeline they were dropping through as they spoke.

And he spoke of the list. 

“I am on this list, you say?” T’Challa asked. Tony saw his calculating eyes narrow, and thought he saw the curled stance of a panther for a flash. 

“Yes,” Tony said. “As well as many others.”

_ Here goes. _

“Including Steve Rogers and the remaining Rogue Avengers.”

Silence through the room, made all the more obvious by the echoing space. Tony didn’t let himself look away from T’Challa—who, to the king’s credit, didn’t look away either.

“That makes sense,” said the Panther. “They are very powerful.” 

“I know they reside here. It is nothing I will reveal or use against you.” Tony’s words were hasty, running together at the seams. “But I need to know where, and when, so that I can… inform them of their roles in this mission appropriately.”

Allowing himself a glance toward Shuri, Tony was rewarded with a thumbs-up. Good, he’d started this right, at least.  
As for the other royalty, they shared looks so intense Tony thought they might have been communicating telepathically. For all he knew, they were; when T’Challa looked back at him, it was with an air of decision. 

“Bucky Barnes—the White Wolf, has retired to the fields of our kingdom,” T’Challa said. “He is no longer dangerous, and he no longer wants to be.”

Tony nodded curtly, clasping his hands behind his back so no one could see their tense trembling. “Understandable,” he managed, and it was only a little bit flat. 

“Rogers and the rest have been gone for many months after their current… occupation,” T’Challa continued. He searched for the last word, and Tony tried not to growl at the obvious secret that was being kept. But that was understandable too.

It was all understandable. Didn’t mean that he had to  _ like  _ it. 

“And they will return…?” Tony prompted.

“By our estimates,” Okoye contributed, “in three days.”

_ Three days. _

“That’s a good amount of time, I believe,” Okoye continued.

“Indeed,” Shuri said. “Mr. Stark and I can have at least half a spaceship built by then. Did we tell you about the magic warp core?”

And they were off again, ebbing and flowing through the mechanics of their project for the next few days. Tony dove in aggressively, all too eager to shove the thought of harder conversations to the furthest reaches of his mind. They joined the dozens of others tied up in paper bags, each labeled in hasty sharpie:  _ later. _

_ Later.  _

He would deal with it all later.

Three days was plenty of time. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ah yes, we're getting close to the draaaaaaama.
> 
> I've been putting it off enough lol.


	86. Got it Wrong

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am Stressed and I don't know whyyyyyyyyyyy so here enjoy this somewhat longer-than-planned chapter *backflips into the distance*

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

Clapping his hands twice, Peter leapt up atop the coffee table and surveyed the group of individuals he’d gathered over the last hour. It was mid-afternoon by this point; Peter was, after all, a teenager, and no amount of good intentions could change the deeply programmed need to sleep away the morning when on winter break. Ned and MJ had needed time to make their way over, as well. As for Loki, well, Peter had found him on the roof, carefully replicating the form of a Canadian goose. 

“What’s with the bird?” Ned asked as he settled onto one of the chairs. He watched Loki curiously, but didn’t seem at all surprised. 

_ Yeah, it’s a goose in the Avenger’s Compound. So? _

Peter snorted. “Take a wild guess.”

“Loki,” Ned said. Then he waved, and the goose hissed. 

“If we could get to the  _ point?”  _ MJ prompted, flopping down next to the goose. She reached out a hand, and Loki cringed away before reluctantly allowing her to poke his bill.

“Loki, you looked absolutely ridiculous,” Peter deadpanned. “Just thought you should know.”

The goose hissed. 

“Yes, yes, the point.” Peter spun around on the table until he got all three of his friends within his vision. “Welcome to the first and primary meeting of the Association of Navigational Strategy for the Locating of Infinity, or ANSLI. We come to order!”

MJ snorted. “ANSLI?”

“Don’t judge, I spent all morning coming up with that.” 

“Of course you did,” sighed the goose.

Everyone blinked at him, and Loki fluffed his feathers irritatedly. “What? It is, of course, all magic. My speech is a part of it.”

“Yes, I know. I heard your voice out of a snake for three weeks,” Peter said. “You just look ridiculous.”

“I believe you are exaggerating.”

“You’re a  _ goose,”  _ Ned observed. “That’s objectively ridiculous.” 

_ “Anyway,”  _ MJ interrupted with pointed aggression, “ANSLI?”

“ANSLI,” Peter agreed. He cleared his throat dramatically, returning to his speech. “Mr. Stark, our founder, is off pursuing the application of our quest. But he has left us with a mission! A mission of navigational strategics that will define our futures! The task will be difficult, the snacks scarce, but I am ready to suffer it all for this order we have received. Are you ready, my team?”

Ned whooped. “I’m ready!”

“Are you _ ready,  _ my team?”

MJ sighed. “I’m ready…”

“Are you—” Peter broke off into a giggle. “I’m sorry, Loki, I can’t take you seriously as a goose. Can you choose something a bit more dignified? Please?”

Loki huffed. “This poultry form is quite dignified. But if you insist…”

A crackle of magic and a flash of greenish power later, Peter was blinking at a thankfully humanoid form. Loki adjusted his tunic and sat. Stretching his legs beneath the table, the Asgardian raised his pointed eyebrows at Peter. 

“I’m ready,” he said.

“Good. Now, the issue ANSLI seeks to solve today is the path the Avenging team will take when they depart from Earth.” Peter climbed off the table, getting comfortable for the coming discussion. “Where will we go first? What will we pursue?”

Silence, for a moment, as Peter asked the question. Expressions of thought twisted his comrade’s faces. He could see them filtering through every lick of information they possessed. Priorities flickered and confusions lingered, and Peter took a moment to pursue his own ideas. 

It was, of course, MJ who spoke first. “We have at least an idea for two of the Stones we don’t have, right?” she pried. 

“Correct,” Loki said. “The Space Stone lies in the vault of Asgard. The Soul is hidden in a place called Vormir, which I, unfortunately, haven’t heard of.”

“But if a Stone’s there, it’s gotta be important.” Ned cupped his chin in his palm. “I bet you could figure that out pretty easily, asking around.”

“In space?”

“Yeah in space!” Ned grinned at Peter. “Ask those aliens. I bet somebody would tell you. And even if you didn’t manage that, hooking up with a celestial database of some kind—intergalactic internet? I dunno. But anyway, hooking up to something like that could let you in on its coordinates.”

“That’s a good point,” Peter agreed. “And we know the Power Stone’s in Andromeda somewhere, yeah?”

Loki frowned. “How do you know?”

“You told me. Back when we were doing research at the beginning of all this.”

“Indeed I did.” Loki nodded. He was fiddling with one of his knives—Peter hadn’t seen him manifest it. Used to it by this point, Peter simply blinked and moved on.

“What about Reality? Do we know anything about that?”

“If we do, the knowledge is not with me,” Loki admitted. “I have a theory that I’ve been in contact with it before, but I was… indisposed when it was squirreled off by my father and brother.”

“Ah.”

“Would Thor know?” Ned leaned forward, his voice a bit squeaky. Peter saw that his gaze kept flickering down to Loki’s knife. The Asgardian must have noticed, for he angled the blade in Ned’s direction. Peter kicked him under the table. 

“He would,” Loki agreed, giving Peter a glare. “Unfortunately, I also don’t know where  _ he  _ is.”

“Isn’t he on Asgard?” MJ inquired. 

“No, actually,” Loki clarified. He trailed his knife along the carpet, leaving a ragged streak along the colorful fuzz. “He’s actually off looking for the Infinity Stones himself.”

Peter stiffened—so did the rest. “What?”

“He doesn’t end up finding any. But he is looking.”

Peter, remembering the other part of Tony’s instruction, added, “that’s something else we have to manage. We should try to disrupt as few timelines as possible.”

“Makes sense,” MJ said. “Try to avoid unwanted consequences.”

Ned rubbed his face, letting out a groan. “Oooo there’s so much to manage… can we get this written down?”

With a flicker and a blink, the center of the table began to glow. Peter instinctively jumped to his feet, but relaxed as FRIDAY’s eager voice filtered through the room. “I thought you’d never ask,” she purred. 

“Woah,” Ned breathed as the holoscreen extended between them like a television, already complete with the cliff notes of their conversation. FRIDAY pulled up a timeline, incrementing the months from now until May of 2018. Somehow, the AI managed to do it all with a flourish, and Peter could almost image Tony standing beside them and waiting for applause.

“Thank you, FRIDAY,” MJ said. “That’s super helpful.”

“Of course.”

“So,” Peter began, leaning close to the screen. “Where do we want to start?”

“With the warp core, it should be possible to reach Asgard before the summer of next year,” Loki hummed. “That’s imperative, if we hope to reach the Tesseract.”

“What? Why?”

Loki looked at his knife, running it beneath his fingernails. “Because the summer of next year is when my father dies, opening the path for my sister to return from Helhiem to wreak havoc on Asgard.”

Silence.

“... what.”

If Peter didn’t know the god, he wouldn’t have noticed the slight furrow of Loki’s brow, the flickering of his eyes. He wouldn’t meet Peter’s gaze. “If we don’t reach Asgard before Hela arrives, there will be no retrieval of the Tesseract. Avoiding her would be impossible, much less defeating her before the time is right.”

“A-alright then,” Peter stuttered. “I… didn’t know you had a sister.”

“Neither did I,” Loki said curtly.

The obvious mental message of  _ ‘drop it’  _ was practically screaming off the god, and Peter didn’t press the subject. He filed it away for later, however; Loki deserved a conversation. The silence stretched for an awkward beat before Peter hastily found something to fill it with.

“So Asgard is our first destination,” he said. FRIDAY obligingly added that to their document. “Then what?”

* * *

Stephen dropped into a roll. His hands flashed up, magic sparking off the fingers. The Rook’s swipe cracked far too near his skull, and Stephen caught the lift of the Cloak to pull himself to his feet again.

“I’m here—” Mandala shields reverberated with the connection of the next blow. Stephen gritted his teeth. “I’m here to help!” 

This was supposed to be a scouting mission, a push to address what had unbalanced the perfect, ongoing battle that ravaged this dimension. But to impart information, Stephen needed communication. The Rook either wouldn’t listen or couldn’t. He supposed it wasn’t unheard of for translation spells to warp under pressure.

Pressure that Stephen was certainly under. 

The Rook lunged. It’s wings curled open wide, the gust enough to send Stephen stumbling. The groping, clawed fingers curled around the corner of the Cloak. The garment stiffened. Stephen sent his magic crackling across the surface, and the Rook roared, releasing the Cloak. Brown light burned into its talon, and Stephen’s lip twitched into a snarl. 

Nothing touched his Cloak. 

“Alright, that’s enough,” he growled. He dropped his mandala shields and lunged sideways. The Rook’s swipe caught thin air, and Stephen’s hands circled as he fell. He drew power from his memory of the place he’d entered this dimension, sending the portal spinning toward the Rook. 

And the creature  _ climbed over it.  _

Stephen stared.

It was instinct that kept him from becoming a sorcerer-kebab as the Rook pounced for him again. Stephen rolled, mind still trying to understand that the creature’s claws had touched and  _ used  _ his portal, like it was part of the physical realm. Silvery dust crunched beneath his shoulders. 

Then Stephen was on his feet again, dismissing his portal. It wasn’t that the portal had failed, no; the gateway was as complete as any. The Rook had simply  _ used  _ his magic as a foothold. He’d never seen anything like it.

Stephen’s fingers tightened against his sling ring, and he faced the next lunge with a dark grin. 

Now it was a puzzle. And Stephen could fight—but solving puzzles was so much more interesting. 

* * *

Tony and Shuri stepped back as one, surveying the sprawling holographic diagram spinning slowly before them. It was perfectly rendered and looked almost solid. No extra light escaped to the surfaces around it, and Tony had to resist the urge to punch it.

“Well that is  _ elegant,”  _ he said, watching the spinning of the spaceship. Beside it, a rendering of the warp core rotated slowly. Using the data from FRIDAY, Shuri had been able to rewrite it into her own program’s display interface, and allowed them to observe both parts in one glance. 

“Don’t you think?” Shuri grinned. 

Tony nodded. 

Then he said, “there could be a bit more red and gold” at the precise moment Shuri sighed, “I’d like more  _ panther,  _ but I can live with this.”

They stared at each other, surprised, before bursting into laughter. “Well well,” Tony chuckled, “it seems we have some design preferences.”

“Oh but imagine it! A cat spaceship!”  
“Imagine how flashy and dramatic the red and gold could look against—”

Shuri cut him off. “It’s in  _ space!  _ No one’s gonna see it.”

Tony glowered, flicking her on the temple and protesting, “we’ll land and shit! There’ll be aliens judging my taste in star cars.”

“That’s not a thing.”

“How do you know? When’s the last time you had a fashion conversation with an alien?”

“Last week,” Shuri shot back. “Loki was complaining about sweatpants.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “That god. He’s fine with a phone, but as soon as you suggest he changes out of his  _ very conspicuous  _ clothing, he starts hissing at you.”

“Well, what if I told you to wear something that  _ wasn’t  _ an ACDC t-shirt?”

“Gasp!” Tony pressed a hand to his chest. “I am shocked you would even suggest such a thing.”

Shuri groaned. “Alright, old man, let’s get back to the prototype, shall we?”

“Sure. E.”

“Did you just—”

Tony smirked.

Shuri straight-up punched him this time—softly, in the shoulder—and Tony stumbled away, laughing outright. “Hey, hey!”

“Never ever make that pun ever again.”

“Okay okay,” Tony pouted. “It’s not as fun as what I can do with Stranger Things anyway.”

Shuri rolled her eyes. “In this case, I am perfectly happy to be second-fiddle to the wizard.” She changed the subject, waving her hand in the direction of the prototype hologram to bring it closer into focus. “I’m not happy with the waste recycling location. I think we could optimize that. The less tubing and circuitry needed to process and transfer, the better.”

Tony nodded, instantly snapping back into more serious conversation. “The warp core can maintain an initial acceleration of 5.25 meters-per-second squared, which doesn’t sound like much—”

“Until you consider that the weight of this bad boy is 40 million Newtons,” Shuri finished. 

“Right. Once orbit is reached and the gravitation pull is escaped, that acceleration starts to grow exponentially. E = mc^2 and all that.” Tony waved his hands expansively. “At that point, the magic will begin to bend space. More energy comes flooding in, and we reach light speed in about eight and a half days. Then twice the speed of light almost three days after that. Theoretically, we can keep accelerating to twelve or thirteen times the speed of light, but I’m only taking us to seven to minimize the risk of, well, catastrophic failure.”

“Right.”

“So yeah, we have a few more metric tons we can spare to optimize functionality and not worry so much about weight.”

“Thanks, magic,” Shuri said, leaning across the holotable.

“Indeed.” 

The ship was smooth and circular, a crescent-cut circle narrow at one end and flat at the other. Two wide bays edged off from the flat side, as though they’d been molded atop a sphere then removed, and at the tip of the narrow end perched a secondary navigational and weaponry center. Facilities and supply wings, along with residency, primary navigation, and outside access was all spread over the flatter surface on the opposite side of the circle. The whole design was reminiscent of a sting-ray. Tony thought the pointed secondary bay and the weaponry looked barbed on the end of its tail, with the wider ‘head’ extending through space like wings.

The curvature of those wings was, of course, to optimize the lift provided upon initial takeoff. Without them, the weight distribution would cause the ship to spin with air resistance. And they couldn’t have that.

As Shuri picked apart the hologram to reorganize the left side of the ship’s body, the bracelet on her wrist began to buzz. Shuri grumbled something, but reached down to press something on its edge, then returned to the prototype.

“Shuri?” T’Challa’s voice filtered into the room in astonishingly good quality. 

“Yes, brother? Who else would it be?”

“We need you in the councilroom,” the king sighed. “Can you get up here?”

“Sure. Stark?”

“It’s a Wakandan matter.”

“Ah.”

“It’s good,” Tony said. “I’ll finish up with waste recycling while you’re gone.”

“Thanks,” Shuri nodded. “I’ll be there soon, brother.”

T’Challa must have heard Tony’s words, for he responded, “enjoying the lab, Mr. Stark?”

“Always.” Tony gave the wristband a thumbs-up; who knew, perhaps Shuri was somehow broadcasting that data. 

With half a tap, T’Challa’s voice disappeared, and Shuri was spinning across the room. She gave Tony a salute and skipped out through the lab doors on the first tier. Tony saw the hexagonal wall of the hallway for a brief moment before he was alone. 

A tick of muscle memory almost had him calling out to FRIDAY, but he stopped himself. Instead, he turned back to the ship. 

“Alright then,” Tony hummed. He hooked his ankle around a nearby chair and dragged it over, settling down and leaning forward. “Let’s see what I can do with you.”

* * *

“You are decidedly interesting now,” Stephen gasped out as he parried another swipe.

The Rook grunted something that could have been an alien language. Stephen had no idea. 

“Yes, I know, you already were interesting. But now it’s personal!” His Eldritch whips met a maw of fur and carapace. The Rook’s curling horns flared across its skull, ivory colors flashing. They clattered like a baby rattle. 

“Alright then.” Stephen shook out his wrists. The shredded ends of his bandages dangled from flexing fingers, and he drew far into the mirror dimension. Between one lunge and the next, a silken blade of foggy energy extended in his hands. 

He parried the creature’s next blow. Like his portal, the Rook seemed to treat the magic like it had physical form. It’s fur sheered off against the blade’s razor-sharp edge, it’s skin splitting, but it’s talons and horns  _ clanged  _ across the usually incorporeal blade like it was made of metal. 

“That’s so weird,” Stephen grumbled. He leapt backward. The Cloak’s lift gave him an extra few feet. The dance of fencing sent him spinning around the creature, swiping at every non-lethal place he could find. The beast roared. Stephen cried out, wincing; the sound carried like a short-range explosion, sending his head ringing. It took every ounce of his self-control not to drop his weapon and cover his ears. 

As he shook his head, darting backward to try and find his balance, he felt the cool ooze of liquid on his left cheek. The sharp pain of the noise had dissipated, but the ringing remained. Stephen lifted his shoulder and tried to wipe away the blood, keeping his eyes on the creature. The pressure sent his ear screaming, and Stephen choked out a strangled curse, jumping back.

“Now, there was no need for that,” he told the Rook, as sternly as he could manage in his grimace of pain. 

The Rook snarled. 

And as Stephen moved back, retreating away from the slinking, threatening stalk of the Rook, he heard another snarl. It was low and long and it came from behind him, rolling out of an immense throat and between daggered fangs.

Stephen froze. And turned.

Crouched behind him in all its feline strength, another creature blinked slitted eyes. Three tufted tails whipped. The air buffeted its striped fur, and Stephen felt it in his hair and the way the Cloak pulled tighter around him. Feathered and antlered, the creature raised wicked talons.

The Bishop.

“Well fuck,” Stephen declared.

* * *

It may have been anywhere from ten minutes to an hour and a half before the Wakandan lab was suddenly ringing with Shuri’s voice. Rather urgently, Tony might add.

“Stark? Stark!”

Tony glanced up from his work, the spidering sum of his alternating series dissolving away from his grasping thoughts. He almost complained before he processed the haste of Shuri’s words.

“What, what is it?” He was standing before he realized it.

“We got it wrong,” the princess faltered. “I’m sorry.”

“Got what wrong?” The ship? The core? What did he need to recalculate? Where did he need to redesign, re-evaluate? Should he wait until she got back?

“I couldn’t stop them, not without raising suspicion of their presence to the rest of the council.” Shuri’s words ran over each other, gaining the slight clicking rhythm of her native language, and Tony could feel her anxiousness over the line. “T’Challa tried, but…”

“Shuri,  _ explain.” _

Silence, for a long moment. Then an inhale. “We said three days. We were wrong.”

Tony’s thoughts went white.

“The Rogues are on their way to your location now.”

* * *

Back on Earth, in a Sanctum manned only by a distracted librarian halfway across the building, Stephen’s phone began ringing unanswered.

Again and again and again.

* * *

Tony shot upward, the chair flying backward and his hands flying to brace against the table. To brace against anything. 

_ “What?”  _ he breathed. 

“I’m sorry, I’m on my way, but I’m not gonna make it in time!” Tony could hear her footsteps over the line. 

The floor felt cold and uneven beneath his feet as Tony stumbled backward. His hands shot up to grip his hair, his teeth gritting. This wasn’t happening, this  _ couldn’t be happening— _

They were coming here. His team, whatever they were now, were  _ here already. _

And he was alone. 

“How long?” he choked. “How long do I have, Shuri?”

“I don’t know.”

“Damn it!” Tony sliced his hand through the hologram, dismissing it in a puff of code. His breath came fast, a cadence of his panicked heartbeat, and he waited for the moment when it wouldn’t come at all.  _ Everything  _ was coming too fast; thoughts and images and memories of places not so far in the past. Tony tried to blink them away. He felt his fingers against his scalp, felt his feet on the floor, and  _ breathed. _

He could run, he knew. But as his gaze darted toward the exit, he knew he would only lose himself further. He didn’t know which direction was away and which would take him up into the paths of the incoming team, the incoming  _ invaders  _ that he didn’t have the fortifications to avoid. Trapped, backed into a corner, the weapons of distrust were brandished before him. 

It wasn’t suppose to happen this way. He was supposed to meet them on  _ his  _ turf, under  _ his  _ conditions. He was supposed to have control. 

Rational thought tried to claw its way to the forefront of his mind, screaming to be heard over Tony’s rushing panic.  _ It’s alright! You can do this, you needed to speak to them anyway! Use this. You can  _ do  _ this! _

Ice blue eyes and red and silver wings and a shadow of crimson and black. Words in voices he used to know, gestures in hands he used to lay his life within. Hands that had broken it, twisted it, nearly taken it. He remembered those hands and how dexterous they were with the gun, the bow, the knife, the power, the shield. He remembered their gaits, the pattern of their steps. He remembered  _ them.  _

Remembered how he’d betrayed them. How they’d betrayed him.

He didn’t have words. He  _ couldn’t  _ find words, not anywhere in the sea of conflicting thoughts and churning emotions that was swelling up to swallow him. 

So Tony did the only thing he could do. 

His phone was cold and slick and it was too easy to find the contact he needed. He moved with brutal focus, and the ringtone was thrumming before he’d even blinked once. 

Perhaps he couldn’t run. But he could follow through a door.

The phone rang. And rang. And rang.

“Pick up, Strange,” Tony hissed, bouncing on his feet, eyes glued to the entrance of the lab. “Pick  _ up.” _

Nothing. 

Tony dialed again.

“Come on you fucking street magician! The one time I need your help  _ now,  _ actually need it…  _ pick up!” _

The call rang out. Tony’s throat closed, and he dialed a third time.

Nothing.

_ “Please!” _

But his escape did not answer. His chance fell short of his grasp, and Tony’s hand dropped slowly to his side. He might have dropped his phone; he didn’t know. He couldn’t hear. The keys to his release were gone, snatched away in his last flicker of hope. There was nothing he could do, nothing he could change, no control left. 

He was alone and he was afraid and no one was coming. Not this time.

The lab door opened to laughter. 

Laughter had never been strangled into silence quicker, atmosphere had never darkened any faster, and silence had never held as much tension. 

Tony met the eyes of Steve Rogers for the first time in six months and fourteen days. 

“Hello, Captain.”

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *finger guns*


	87. Bitter Silence

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here you go

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

There was something about silence that forced your focus to it. Something in the tension of a withheld word, of the moment between one breath and the next, that was all you could think about. So much so that speaking was almost involuntary. So much so that you spoke prefatorily in order to avoid the silence in the first place. 

And then there were the silences that  _ hurt.  _ The silences that built up like the vacuum before an explosion, and had you unable to speak as you braced yourself for the impact. They were the silences that paralyzed you, kept you trapped in a repeated half-second with no way out and nothing to defend yourself.

Such bitter silence.

Steve had grown a beard. That was Tony’s first thought, despite everything. He’d grown a shaggy mane of a beard, like Thor’s had been, and his hair was a bit longer. Aside from that, he didn’t look much different. 

The same, however, could not be said for Natasha Romanoff.

Tony’s Russian-speaking, lie-weaving, ass-kicking  ~~friend~~ assassin had shed the signature ginger of her hair in favor of platinum blonde. In all honesty, Tony thought it suited her. 

Wasn’t it strange, the thoughts that came in moments like this? Wasn’t it strange, what you felt?

Before any awkwardness, any fear, any anger, Tony was struck with approval.  _ Good,  _ he thought,  _ good sense to throw off the eyes, change your signature styles to camouflage even slightly. Perfect way to do it, too. _

So that’s what Tony said. No anger, no fear, just the pure instinct of his first thought and his first emotion. 

“The beard’s throwing me off, not gonna lie. Like the hair, though.” 

The silence broke like the surface tension of rising water, and so did Tony’s memories. He could still taste the words in his mouth as the nearly painful rush of  _ everything all at once  _ assaulted him. 

His own voice.  _ ‘We need to be put in check! Whatever form that takes, I'm game. If we can't accept limitations, if we're boundary-less, we're no better than the bad guys.’  _

Standing together before an army of robots made by Tony’s own hand. The confidence he’d felt, then, when he’d put his life in their hands and known they’d support it.

Wanda’s voice.  _ ‘You locked me in my room.’ _

A moment of quiet pride as Tony watched their newest recruit wipe the sweat off her brow and stand tall, gesturing to Vision to come at her again. To push her ever higher. 

Sam’s voice’s scoffing after Tony admitted his mistake.  _ ‘That’s a first.’ _

Two coffee cups in his hands, one dark and the other creamy. Handing one to Sam. A smile on Tony’s face as he murmured cheers with a man he’d thought understood him.

Natasha’s voice.  _ ‘I'm not the one that needs to watch their back.’ _

An empty training room but for the two of them, and a Russian spy walking Tony through a martial art’s stance again and again and again.

Steve’s voice. Steve’s voice, over and over, so many moments and questions and wonderings. Tony’s own voice, wound around the Captain’s.

_ ‘But if you put the hammer in an elevator…’ _

_ ‘It would still go up.’ _

Snow in Siberia and water on the raft. 

_ ‘I'm doing what has to be done!’ _

_ ‘You keep telling yourself that.’ _

A hand up when Tony had fallen, a nod of support when he needed it.

_ ‘I’m trying to—I’m trying to keep you from tearing the Avenger’s apart.’ _

_ ‘You did that when you signed.’ _

A shield cracked in two down the middle in a vision of monsters descending on a world Tony had failed to protect.  __

_ ‘Shit!’ _

_ ‘Language.’ _

How much it hurt to hear Steve’s blame, his disappointment, after Ultron. How much Tony had wanted him to understand.

_ ‘You’re gonna miss me. There’s gonna be a lot of manful tears.’ _

_ ‘I will miss you, Tony.’ _

A black eye and a cold suit and a murder long past.

_ ‘Did you know?’ _

_ ‘Yes.’ _

A cracked mask and a bloodied gaze and a shield plunging into his heart.

_ ‘He’s my friend.’ _

_ ‘So was I.’ _

There were too many and too much as Tony stood there staring at a team he’d once called his own. Too much anger, too much sadness as he realized he didn’t know them anymore, that he’d never really known them, that they’d never taken the time to know him either.

God, what could he even  _ say? _

“I was supposed to have three more days,” Tony declared, sliding his hands into his pockets. “You guys are early. And not fashionably.”

Steve opened his mouth. Closed it. Spoke, finally, sounding so comically confused that Tony almost laughed. “Tony—Stark. What are you… what are you doing here?”  
“Researching abroad?” Tony said, gesturing to the area around him. “No need to answer that question yourself. I know.”

“How?”

Tony shrugged. “I pay attention, you know. Who do you think pulled the wool over the eyes of certain  _ other  _ people paying the same amount of attention?”

“Why would you?” That from Wilson, bitter and angry and accusatory. Like he’d done something wrong.

Tony blinked. “I wasn’t supposed to have to deal with this for another three days,” he said flatly. “I was supposed to have three more days.”

“Were you planning on seeing us?” Natasha stepped forward, head cocked slightly. Her weight was in the balls of her feet, the same way Peter’s shifted whenever he was readying himself in case he needed to fight.

The thought was small and shivering and pathetic, but Tony couldn’t stop it.  _ I don’t want to fight you again. _

“I was. But not yet.”

_ I was planning on running. I was planning on having my words prepared, having my family at my back to keep me on my feet. I was planning on having support. I was planning to not wrestle a four-on-one.  _

_ I was planning that the  _ useless fucking wizard  _ answered his phone this one goddamn time. _

Steve held out a hand—a subtle order that Tony didn’t know how to read anymore. “Why?”

“To ask…” Tony swallowed. “To update you. On a situation we’re facing.”

Those were the magic words, it seemed. From one moment to the next, the awkward confusion that had floated in the space between them fizzled. The Rogues went from caught off-guard, unsure of how to react, to in their element and ready for debriefing. The shift was tangible, nearly audible, and Tony snorted ruefully.

“That’s right,” he said. “Your war is here.”

By some miracle, his sneer went over Steve’s head. “Where? When?”

“Somewhere in space,” Tony explained truthfully. “And in 2018.”

The confusion was back; the Rogues shared a glance between them. They still hadn’t advanced through the threshold of the lab’s door. 

“It’s… 2016,” Steve observed.

“Give the guy a cigar.” Tony crossed his arms.

Sam rolled his eyes, stepping forward slightly, though remaining in formation behind Steve. “Are you going to explain or just stand there making veiled insults?”

“I don’t know,” Tony snapped. “Are you going to come in or just stand there pointing out the obvious?”  
An exasperated sigh, from one of the four—Tony didn’t care to try and identify who. Steve lifted a hand, however, moving forward into the safe space of the lab. His booted feet looked out of place on the silvery tiles, his expression so severe against the backdrop of bright patterns on the colorful walls. 

And the saturation of anxiety in Tony’s bloodstream went from average to absolutely explosive with no warning whatsoever. 

“Stop!” Tony barked, taking a step back as Rogers took one forward. He raised his own hand, mirroring the gesture of the Captain, and then the other in the universal sign of  _ halt. _ “I take it back,  _ please do not come in.” _

His flippant words, not at all matching the turmoil in his gut that he fought to keep off his face, didn’t find hold. In a stream of tired muscle, tech, power, and mind, the Rogues streamed down into the first tier of the workshop. It could have been a familiar sight—homecoming after the mission—had Tony not been the mission at hand. Had he not had to spin in place to try and keep the invasion in his gaze as they fanned out. 

Their soldier's instincts had them surrounding him in a crescent-edged semicircle without thought. It was what was natural for them. But in the focal point of the caging parabola, Tony’s heart beat a jackrabbit rhythm, and he could feel a tickle, a scrape of scarab legs, on the inside of his skull.

_ Not now. Please not now.  _

“Always come here after missions, then?” Tony managed something impudent, but his tone was tight and took the edge off. 

“Usually,” Natasha said. “Shuri likes to hear the updates of our missions and tells us where to store the tech we confiscate.” The truth in her voice was an olive branch. Tony wasn’t too proud to take it. 

He wasn’t too proud to do anything right now.

“Ah good, keeping busy then,” Tony said. He paddled on the ball of his foot to watch Wanda for a moment, then blinked back in Sam’s direction. “Just back from where?”

Silence. 

Tony sighed, nodding and resisting the urge to run his hands through his hair. “Right, you can’t tell me.”

“We can’t tell you anything.” Steve’s voice was quiet. Resigned. “We shouldn’t even have told you we came back here.”

“I figured you did. Don’t lose any sleep over it.” Tony smirked. 

“Lose sleep over you?” Wanda scoffed, and Tony pivoted to face her. “Hardly.”

Tony’s smirk widened. “Liar.”

“Stop,” Natasha sighed. “Haven’t we done this enough?”

“About that—” Sam raised his hand, and Tony was pivoting yet again, trying to keep both the Falcon and Natasha in his vision. 

“Are you going to do this now?” Tony found himself saying. Found himself snarling. “You want to talk about it all  _ now _ .”

The capricious shift in Tony’s demeanor shocked Sam into stepping back. It shocked Tony just as much, but he took a step forward—because suddenly, undeniably, the anger felt good. It was simple; simpler than the sadness, than the fear and the denial that kept him from facing it. Anger wasn’t vulnerable. Anger wasn’t helpless. Tony wanted that anger, needed it to move forward in this room of memories, else he wasn’t sure he would ever move again. 

“You are wanted felons. You’re terrorists, in some places, and I honestly can’t blame those places. You’re standing here because I’m letting you.”  
“T’Challa—”

“There’s a UN member at the top of my contact list, at the brush of my fingertips,” Tony growled. “You’re standing here because I’m letting you. Because despite consequences, despite truth, I know this world is going to need you.” 

“What for? Why do you need to talk to us?” Steve’s voice was cool, calming, without an ounce of reaction to Tony’s tone.

But Tony didn’t want to be calmed. He was falling, burning— God, he was so angry. Angry at the Rogues before him, angry at the circumstances that put them there, angry at Strange and his failure to help anything at all, angry at fate, angry at this multiverse, angry at himself. He couldn’t stop. He wanted to break things, wanted to render built objects into entropy. 

“I don’t need to talk to you,” Tony purred. “The world might need you, but I certainly don’t. You’re  _ early.  _ Ask me in three days.”

Without anther word, Tony rolled his shoulders back, lifted his chin, and stalked toward the exit. 

But Wanda was faster. 

A flickering tongue of crimson power wrapped around Tony’s ankle. The magic was cold and sharp, so different from Loki and Strange’s. It was gone as soon as it came, but it came long enough to stall Tony, long enough for Steve to move forward.  “Wait,” the Captain began, wrapping a hand around Tony’s wrist. 

Everything in Tony’s mind went silent.

“Let go of me.” Each word carried the resonance of a gunshot in Tony’s mind. Each bounced off the red and white shell of a scarab, lifting its claws toward his consciousness.

“Where’s the fight?” Steve asked. “You can’t just—”

_ “Let go of me.” _

“If something’s coming, we need to know. You can’t deny information because of pride!”

“For fuck’s sake Rogers!”

“You can’t leave—”

No he couldn’t. He couldn’t ever leave, could ever get away from them, not here not in his head not in this world he needed to run he needed to  _ leave— _

Tony writhed. So suddenly and so violently that Rogers broke off, his superstrong fingers tightening automatically on Tony’s wrist. Something harsh and animalistic broke from Tony’s lungs, something between a roar and a whimper, but it never made it past his lips. 

Everything was cold, heavy, bloody, and what was there to do but fight anymore?

Siberia was so very lonely, and Tony wanted to go home.

The ragged edges of the engineer’s fingernails caught the skin on the back of his attacker’s hand, violently enough to break through it. He dropped off his legs, going limp in Rogers’ hold. The sudden sting of blood and the added weight of Tony’s body had the Captain releasing him, and Tony landed in a roll, scrambling to his feet a moment later. 

He didn’t care how wild his eyes looked when he spun to face the Rogues. He didn’t care if there was no gauntlet or armor to protect him as he raised his palm. 

“Don’t. Touch. Me,” Tony said simply.

“Tony…”

“If information is the only power I have over you, I will use it. You will not follow me. You will not call after me. When  _ I have need of you,  _ I will meet you again and my team will be there. You are entitled nothing from me.”

“For the lo—”

“See you in three days,” Tony said. And left.

No matter how much he wanted to, no matter how much he tried to force himself to, Tony couldn’t quite manage the trust to turn his back as he walked through the door.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that went... just great... 
> 
> Tangent and kind of off topic BUT! Tony's speech at the beginning of endgame? The "no trust, liar" speech? That's like this whole block of dialogue right at the beginning, an explosion of emotion after all the crap that just went down--a snap if you will? Gooood storytelling. And then there isn't speech of forgiveness, not like there was of accusation: just the few lines of dialogue, the subtle actions, the expressions as the team mends itself through time and the mission at hand? Kinda love that, just a bit. 
> 
> ANYWAY hope you enjoyed, and I'll see you soon!


	88. Pick Out a Strategy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Heyoooo! Thanks for all the great feedback on the last chapter--I'm glad the drama was enjoyed! Here's some more. :D

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

“Alright, so we go to Asgard first.” Peter leaned across the table, fingers dancing over FRIDAY’s hologram as he adjusted their makeshift map. “While we’re there, we can hook up to the database the space-travelers use, right Loki?”

“Correct.” 

“From there, to Vormir, wherever that happens to be.” Peter pointed to a random point on the screen. “Hopefully that’ll take enough time that Thor and—wait a second.”

The group paused, sitting up a little straighter. Peter narrowed his eyes, then opened them wide. Then narrowed them again.

“You look like a gecko,” MJ said. “Spit it out, please.”

“If this is a different universe,” Peter began slowly, “and you and Thor were… doing whatever in 2017… but you’re here with us…”

Ned sat ramrod straight, his eyes going wide. ”Wait.”

Loki was smiling, serpentine and scaly, and Peter knew the answer before he asked the question. 

“Are there two Loki’s in this universe?”

“Took you three months to figure it out,” Loki purred. “There are indeed.”

“Oh my God,” Ned squeaked. “Isn’t that bad? Do we have to avoid him? Paradoxes and shit?”

“Of course not,” scoffed Peter. “That’s not how time travel words. We’re in an alternate universe where, in the past and future, both Loki’s have and will exist. So, no worries.”

“Although.” Loki raised a hand. “We may want to do our best to avoid past me, or disrupt his timeline. I have… things to learn.”

MJ glanced at the god, her face carefully blank. But Peter could see the cogs turning behind her eyes, her mind working for esoteric conclusions.

In that way it did. That she always did. 

“Alright then,” Ned said, and Peter blinked. He realized he must’ve been staring. 

Ned continued, “So we avoid past Loki as much as possible. But we do need to find Thor eventually, to ask after Reality.”

“Correct. We’ll find him on his way to Earth in May of 2018.”

“That long?” Peter squeaked. “That’s hardly any time before Thanos is due his arrival.”

Loki looked at him with blank eyes. “That is when Thanos is due his arrival.”

Any intended words died in Peter’s throat. “Oh.”

“Well, we can adjust that part of the timeline as needed,” MJ supplied, moving forward toward the table. “Loki knows where everyone should be, as least as far as Asgard goes.”

Loki nodded, though he didn’t look up. Softly, Peter put a hand on his knee beneath the table. 

“So that’ll be Soul, Mind, Time, Space, and sorta Reality.” Ned counted each off on his fingers. “Leaving Power, right?”

“Yup,” Peter said. “Somewhere in the Andromeda galaxy, apparently.”

“That’s… a lot of galaxy,” MJ observed. “We’ll need more than that.”

“What about the list, then?” Ned sat up on his knees. The sun glanced off his round face—it must be late afternoon now.

“FRIDAY, can you pull that up?” Peter inquired.

FRIDAY brightened the holoscreen. “Of course.” 

A well-rendered photograph of the list appeared in half the screen, the contrast exaggerated so they could see the spindling handwriting that dotted it. Peter practically sat on the table to get closer. The groupings of names were just as random as when he’d first looked at them, but he sorted through them, trying to locate ones he truly didn’t recognize. 

“Okay, we know most of these guys now,” Peter hummed. “T’Challa and all the Rogues. Thor and Hulk and all their crew. Do you know this Valkyrie guy too?” Peter looked at Loki.

“She’s the last of a great force of warriors for Asgard,” Loki supplied, lifting his gaze with a sigh. Peter saw the effort it took, saw the feathers bristling beneath his skin and behind his hair. He held the Asgardian’s gaze.

_ It’s alright. We’re here. We’ll fix this. _

“Scott Lang?” Ned brought Peter’s attention back to the screen.

“Yeah,” Peter said. “I fought him in Germany.”

“Okay then. Carol Danvers? She doesn’t have a group around her.”

Peter frowned. “I don’t recognize that…”

But FRIDAY piped up, pulling up another file to replace their haphazard map. “The boss instructed me to compile information on these names. There isn’t much on Carol Danvers, but there is this. She was a Captain and test pilot for the US airforce, and she flew an unorthodox mission in 1989. It went wrong; the plane crashed and she was killed, along with a scientist and engineer Dr. Wendy Lawson.”

“Well, something’s not true there,” Peter said, jabbing at the screen. “Because that was around twenty eight years ago and she’s most definitely on this list.”

“Indeed, Peter,” FRIDAY agreed. “The other information—records, numbers, and stories—are mostly useless. But there are a few photos.”

They flickered onto the screen. Peter squinted at the image of a blonde woman in an airforce suit and a cap of camouflage material, sporting a  _ very  _ 80s pair of sunglasses and a smirk.

“She looks… mostly normal,” Peter observed, sitting back with a shrug. 

“She was a captain in the US airforce in the 80s,” MJ snorted. “She’s far from normal.”

“Fair.” Ned shifted by the couch again, and Peter shielded his eyes from the light as Ned’s head suddenly stopped blocking it.

Looking back at the list, Peter wondered. “What about Peter Quill?” It sounded like the most normal name out of the bubble of individuals grouped in that corner of the list:  _ ‘Drax’  _ and  _ ‘Gamora’  _ didn’t seem like they would get much in a search.

“Similar information,” FRIDAY recited. “A boy in Missouri by that name went missing 1992. His biological mother, Merida Quill, died of brain cancer that year as well.”

“Poor kid,” Ned sighed.

“So he just… went missing? Kidnapped? Died?”

“No one knows.”

Peter whistled. “It’s a Buzzfeed Unsolved out there, fellas.”

MJ rolled her eyes. “Please never ever say that ever again.”

Peter just grinned, sliding his feet out under the table.

“Neither of those answer our Power Stone inquiry,” Loki observed, moving his own feet so Peter could have more space. “What are we—”

Before he could finish, another sound broke into the room. It was the automized ringing of a digital phone, and Peter immediately looked to the holoscreen. In the corner, a pop-up had emerged.

_ ‘Incoming call: You Know Who I Am.’ _

“It’s Mr. Stark,” Peter said, hopping up to his knees. “FRIDAY?”

“Patching him through to your phone, Peter.”

Fumbling in his pocket for a moment, Peter found his cell and answered the somehow forwarded call. He raised the device to his ear and sat back, eyeing his friends as they watched him curiously.

“Hello Mr. Stark?”

“Kid.”

There was something in Tony’s voice, something strained and cold, that had Peter stiffening. “Are you alright?”

“Is Rhodey there? FRIDAY?”

“Um…” Peter pulled the phone from his ear. “FRIDAY, is the Colonel in the Compound?”

“He has not left for his own residency yet.”

Peter stood, the phone pressed tight to his ear. “Yeah, he’s here. Are you okay? What happened?”

Tony took a breath, and Peter didn’t miss the ragged edge to it. Something tight and protective curled in his gut, and he stiffened. The fingers on his left hand twitched in toward his palm as if reaching for his web-shooters. 

“They told me three days,” Tony mumbled. “God, I was supposed to have days more…”

“Days more to do what? Mr. Stark,  _ what’s wrong?” _

“The Rogues.” Tony’s voice was curt. “They’re here.”

Every word left Peter’s tongue for a long moment. He searched in the empty spinning of  _ no, that has to be wrong  _ until he found something, anything, to say.

“There? With you now?”

Was Tony all alone with them?

Peter’s fingers tightened into fists.

“No, I got away.” Peter heard the choice of words—that Tony’d  _ escaped— _ and swallowed hard. The man continued, “I… I need to talk to Rhodey.”

“You should come back,” Peter said, even as he sprinted from the hall, heedless of his friends’ confused cries. Rhodes’ quarters weren’t far, otherwise Peter would have had FRIDAY transfer the call directly. “As soon as possible. We’ll work this out. Do you want me to get Strange?”

“Already tried that,” Tony sighed. The sound crackled across the line. “He didn’t answer.”

“I can try him again—”

“Don’t bother.” The words hissed, and Tony sounded downright furious for a moment. “He doesn’t want to help us save this world anyway, it seems.”

“Mr. Stark…”

“I’m coming back,” Tony admitted. Peter could hear his feet pattering, and thought the man had to be running. “The flight’s long though.”

“I know.”

Thirteen hours, all alone. 

But Peter was at the Colonel’s door now, knocking with firm franticness. As if sensing his need, Rhodes was there in half a moment.

“Peter,” the Colonel said, leaning on the open door. “What—”

“It’s Mr. Stark,” Peter said, and shoved the phone at the confused Rhodes.

“Tones?” Rhodes wondered, lifting the phone to his ear. “What’s up?”

Peter didn’t hear the reply, but he saw Rhodes’ face tighten. He didn’t hear Tony’s explanation, but he heard Rhodes’ tamed protective fury as he replied. He didn’t hear the reason, but he knew it when Rhodes’ closed his eyes and said  _ ‘I’m sorry. I should have been there.’ _

“Peter’s still here, yeah,” the Colonel said after a moment. Peter looked up sharply.

There was a silence, then Rhodes continued, “he says thank you.”

“For what?” Peter shifted awkwardly.

“For answering.”

“Of—of course,” Peter stuttered. 

The Colonel nodded, speaking to Tony once more. Minutes of awkward lingering on Peter’s part had Rhodes’s eyes flickering to him every once in a while, but it took nearly five minutes for the man to say anything to Peter. 

When he did, he pulled the phone away and said, “I’ve got him. You can go.”

Peter didn’t want to. In fact, he’d never wanted anything less in his entire life. But there was nothing he could do; standing here in helpless frustration wasn’t going to help anyone. So Peter thanked the colonel silently, nodded, and slipped back through the hallway. 

Thirteen hours had never seemed so long.

* * *

Stephen considered himself generally a good chess player. 

He knew when to push, when to fall back, when to sacrifice a piece and when to defend one. He knew how to spot an advantage and pick out a strategy as it played out against him. He knew how to implement his own. 

He knew that even if his magic acted strangely in contact with these creatures, it was still, at its core, the same spell. 

So truly, it wasn’t too difficult to bind the maws and talons of his attackers with sickly brown power. Backed against the edge of the silvery forest of upside-down trees, Stephen conjured the Whips. They dangled from his hands, dripping and hissing, and he spun them slowly. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” Stephen asked. 

The Rook and the Bishop didn’t answer, their snarls cold. It was their nature, Stephen supposed. The strategist and the defender. 

It didn’t make his mission any easier. He wasn’t here to fight the Black Pieces, nor did he seek to help them win their eternal, oroborus battle against the White. He was simply here to gather information; that oroborus battle had been uprooted, the balance tilted. And Stephen wanted to know why.

It probably didn’t help that he was pale as paper and sporting magical weapons, he’d admit. But he worked with the tools he had. 

“If you insist,” Stephen sighed. And lunged.

His wrists flicked, the whips curling outward. The flaring of the Cloak kept Stephen balanced as he leaned. His gaze flickered between the two pieces. It followed the curve of the magic as it found its mark, wrapping snake-like around the Rook’s muzzle. 

Stephen dropped, instantly, slamming his fist into the ground. Magic spat and bubbled, and the whip fused with the hardened plant-matter that was the surface of this dimension. The Rook, caught in its tracks, found itself sprawling. It’s head was pulled between its paws. The Bishop reared, its companion now underfoot, and Stephen sent the second whip flashing outward. 

The Bishop dodged the first attack. It’s dual tails flicked with obvious fury as it leapt over the fallen Rook. There was no pause to observe its fallen companion, no attempt to free it. Stephen supposed that made sense; in a culture of ongoing battle where nothing ever died, only escaped capture to fight again, the values of care and teamwork might fade rather extremely. 

It was interesting how beautiful this multiverse could be, on so many different levels, while holding such twisted difference within it. Silver foliage and suspended trees hanging upside-down in a russet sky cast shade across the infinite war of two broken warlords and their speechless minions. The elegant build of a Bishop—it’s softly striped fur and curling, ebony antlers—gave way to the sheer, vicious dexterity of talons perfectly designed to snap the Achilles tendon and render another crippled and helpless. An army complimented itself in abilities, completely strong and utterly balanced, but the soldiers hardly spared each other a glance. Beautiful, and broken.

Life, in all worlds, was complicated. 

Right and wrong, good and evil—none of it existed, truly. Yet everywhere, in every mindset, the forces of black battled the forces of white in an eternal loop of inconsequential equilibrium. 

But inconsequential equilibrium was still rather insistent on rendering Stephen bleeding into unconsciousness.

Stephen spread his fingers wide, wrists touching at the heels. The Eldritch Whips licked out from where they extended from around his knuckles. Magic met the Bishop’s muzzle with a sizzle of power and a slice of force, and violet-red blood splattered onto Stephen’s forearms. 

The Bishop fell back with a wine, eyes squinting as it pawed at the blood on its face.  When it turned its face back to Stephen, its pupils had slitted to near pinpricks. The expression sent shivers up Stephen’s spine. Maw gaping, tongue reaching as if caught in the crest of a yawn, the beast roared. 

And roared. And  _ roared.  _

Stephen reacted instantly, this time. He dropped his spell and forcibly covered his ears, unable to contain his whine of pain as he tried to protect his already damaged eardrums. The Cloak flared up, protecting him from the noise as best it could, but the waves of intense volume were as incapacitating as heat and flame and metal. 

The sound seemed to last forever, building to a ringing constant in Stephen’s ears. Unable to stand it a moment longer, he risked dropping his hands, risked using them instead to reach for his whips. Sharper than any blade, the roar pounded Stephen’s perception. He might have screamed himself as he sent his magic flying. He might have fought the sound with a roar of his own. But it didn’t matter; the serpentine bindings of the ropes snapped that echoing maw together, silencing the Bishop. 

In the cloudy ringing that followed, Stephen cast the Bishop aside with a flick of his wrist. His whips burrowed toward the nearest hovering tree. They towed Stephen’s attacker with them, allowing him a moment to wipe the blood off his ears and from his jawline.

“Ow,” Stephen muttered, though he couldn’t hear the words. 

The Cloak, concerned, fluttered against him, smearing some of the blood on his face. Stephen patted it unconsciously. Before him, the Rook struggled, tearing at his bindings with those wicked claws. 

Curious, Stephen approached the creature. It stilled as he lifted a hand, fur lifting along the points of its jaw and along its knees and elbows, and growled low around the whips. 

The creature had no ears. 

Frowning, Stephen sidled sideways, out of the Rook’s gaze. He clicked his tongue, as loudly as he could. Stomped his feet. He would have clapped, but the sharp pressure on his damaged limbs was more painful than anything it would gain him. 

None of the sounds produced a reaction from the Rook. Nor did they affect the Bishop, ripping at its own chains a few yards away. 

Stephen blinked.

Oh.  _ Oh.  _ It wasn’t his translation spell, nor was it an inability to communicate. The Blacks could not process sound at all. 

“So the roar,” Stephen said aloud. “It’s not a call for reinforcements. It’s a  _ weapon.” _

Of course it was—Stephen was still feeling the aftermath of the roars, still left confused and disoriented from pain and lack of auditory input. Having no sound-processing capabilities protected the Blacks from their own weapon. And in order to have any effect, the Whites must be able to hear. 

If sound rendered Whites inert, if that’s what the Black Pieces used to “take” or to “capture” the opposing side, to use Earthen words… 

Stephen must be one confusing opponent to still be up and kicking after the Rook and Bishop’s destructive weapon. 

If the Blacks had such a sensory weapon, Stephen could assume the Whites did as well. He could only wonder what it was, however. He could see eyes, noses, mouths, and the Blacks had reacted to pain—whichever was targeted by their opponents didn’t stand out. 

“What do you say we find out?” he asked the Cloak, sensing the words in his throat but not in his ears.

The Cloak rippled, and Stephen took off. He trotted away from the Rook and Bishop, before leaping into the air and letting the Cloak catch his weight and send them both flying low across the land. 

Apparently, chess was more complicated than he remembered. 

Stephen hadn’t played chess in a while. Wong preferred Pente if they did play anything—rare, now that the novices had advanced. The librarian was managing their upcoming sorcerers even as Stephen moved, leaving him alone on this scouting journey that might usually be a duet mission. To be fair, Stephen leaving Wong alone with the novices was almost as grievous a betrayal. The littles could be dangerous. 

In a land ravaged by constant, looping war, it wasn’t long before Stephen was practically stumbling into mortal combat. Beneath the floating trees, the silver earth lay in tatters under the paws of a dozen beasts—their sizes, shapes, and shades flashing on the metallic grass. A chorus of those deafening roars filtered into Stephen’s damaged ears, and he let himself focus wholly on them. 

The sonic energy of the sound sent vibrations through his mystic perception, and Stephen seized the waves as best he could. A twist, a gesture, and a flicker of light later, the sorcerer had warped the sound to a dampened muteness.

That was all the preparation he allowed himself as he swooped down to the level of the battle. Blades of grass meshed around his fingers when he landed. The Cloak swept wide, keeping him balanced as Stephen immediately dropped into a roll, keeping out of the claws of anything that might have set its eye on him. 

Or rather, any Black that might have set its eye on him.

As Stephen straightened, taking in the chaos around him in less than a second, two things became expressly clear to him. One, that the light colored creatures were twisting and reptilian; canine where the Blacks were feline and scaled where they were furry. They lacked eyes, and kept wings tucked tight against their bodies. 

The second noticing was the blood. 

Around him, coating the silver grass and soaking into his boots, trickling from the mouths of creatures sprawled on the earth, red-violet blood was pooling. Without logic or consistency, without reason, Stephen  _ knew  _ it was too much. Knew something on this eternal battlefield was very, very wrong.

Muted sound clashing in his mind, Stephen conjured his shields and spun. A Black latched its eyes on him—the tall, lithe form of another Bishop—and Stephen flinched out of the path of its lunge. His ankles tangled in the whip-thin strand of a White’s tail. It was cold and silken, and Stephen cursed softly in surprise. 

The animal it was attached to sprawled still before him. As a Pawn, the White was smaller, with a larger head and thinner wings, half extended where it lay motionless. Stephen saw a reflective shimmer on their underside. Part of his mind, calculating and curious, figured that was their sensory weapon; a flashing of light to blind the eyesight of their enemies. 

The rest of Stephen’s mind whirred at a thousand thoughts in a single moment. The Pawn wasn’t dead, merely unconscious, with a small trickle of orange-red blood trailing from its ears. In the battle around him, Stephen could perceive a cacophony of roars. They felled Whites within range and direction, even dropped them from the sky, and the Blacks stepped over them to pursue new enemies. 

But he saw no light. No flashes of magnified energy reflected off the White’s wings. Nothing sent the Blacks into unconsciousness; nothing used their Taking weapon to incapacitate the ebony enemy. 

Instead, there was blood. 

Instead, there were Blacks torn open along their spines, Pawns with their necks severed, Rooks bleeding out. Pieces who’s companions didn’t so much as pause—why would they? This was a war to Capture, to Take, to checkmate.

In a war where no one knew the concept of death, a side had just begun to kill.

“Stop!” Stephen cried to a species that couldn’t hear.  _ “Stop!” _

They didn’t stop. Dark furred beasts impaled themselves on the claws of slithering ivory creatures and died, and no one looked at them twice, no one mourned them, no one even realized they wouldn’t be coming back.

“Stop! You don’t know what you’re doing!”

Battle and blood. Wins and war. Death and death and  _ death,  _ all around him, weeding out a population as the other took no casualties.

“Don’t you see—”

White claws wrapped around Stephen’s ruby cloak, and his words faded into the chaos around him. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Never play Pente with my brother the mortification will destroy your entire ancestral line. 
> 
> ANYWAY so I have too much developed for this weird chess world that I wrote up Stephen exploring, but it didn't end up making it into this. Hopefully the weird chess world will become relevant at some point in the future, either in this story or a different one, because I'm kind of proud of it. But the plot must go on!
> 
> Thanks for reading! See y'all soon.


	89. With Diagrams

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

A coffee clutched tight between his hands, Tony sat opposite Rhodes in the dining room of the Compound and stared at nothing. The sensation of warmth on his hands was cozy, and so was the hoodie he’d slumped into as soon as he’d arrived back home. The latter had the added benefit of hiding the skeleton of his newest suit. 

None of it—the coffee, the temperature, the clothing, not even Rhodey across the table from him—could shake the residual cold from Tony’s form. 

“So,” Rhodey said. 

Tony took a sip of coffee.

“I take it things went poorly.”

Tony sighed, speaking into the mug in his hands. “Like a chicken trying to fuck a rat.”

Rhodey opened his mouth, then closed it again with a shudder. “Please never ever ever  _ ever  _ say anything like that ever again.”

Tony huffed and filled his mouth with the scalding, bitter texture of his coffee. 

“And the flight?”

“Just thirteen hours of stewing, overthinking, and self-hatred.”

Rhodey sighed, reaching across the table to cover Tony’s hand with his own. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah.”

“I should have been with you,” Rhodey muttered. “You should  _ not  _ have had to go through that alone, Tony. I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry.” Tony gulped down half the mug. “Only one of us had to go through dealing with them, this way. I didn’t have to worry about how the kid was gonna react—or,  _ God,  _ how they’d react to the kid… Plus, there wasn’t any, y’know.” He gestured vaguely at Rhodey’s form. “Me exacting revenge.”

“For this?” Rhodey lifted one of his legs, the flashing edges of his braces glowing softly. “This isn’t something you need to defend me for. This is the  _ least  _ of the villainy.”

Tony groaned, fighting the urge to press his forehead to the table. “Don’t call them villains, please.”

“Why not?”

“Because they already have too many titles. And if they’re villains, than what am I? We were all just doing what we thought was right.”

Rhodey growled.  _ “‘We were all just’— _ except for the  _ friend  _ who lied to you for who knows how long, then tried to kill you.”

Tony winced, half sloshing coffee over onto his hands. “I tried to kill  _ them.”  _

“Tony, look at me.”

Tony obliged. His friend’s dark, earnest gaze set his ovoid face in stone. “What happened was wrong,” Rhodey said clearly. “What was done to you was wrong. You don’t have to try and justify it. You don’t have to twist it back to blame yourself like everyone tries to force you to believe.”

Tony didn’t answer, looking away.

_ “Hey.” _

“Rhodey…” Reluctantly, Tony forced his gaze back to the colonel. 

“You were hurt. Physically, yes, but it was worse emotionally. I remember when you told me what happened. You don’t though, do you.”

It wasn’t a question, but Tony shook his head anyway. 

“Because you were out of your  _ mind  _ drunk.” Rhodey huffed a rueful chuckle. “I don’t think you would have told me if you weren’t.”

“Nope.” Tony hid the hard truth of that word behind a smirk.

Rhodey’s expression just grew more solemn. “I don’t blame you. How could you share anything, after a betrayal like that? You don’t trust anyone anymore. I can see it happen, I can see it in every word you speak to us.

“And that’s  _ because of Steve.  _ It’s because of Barnes and Natasha and Wanda. It doesn’t matter who was right, who started it, who provoked, or who reacted.  _ You were hurt.” _

Tony couldn’t keep his gaze lifted anymore. It fell with a bump into his coffee, and Rhodey let it stay this time. The swirling browns reminded Tony of Strange’s magic, and his hands tightened around the mug. 

How could he still feel betrayed when he’d tried so hard not to make any expectations?

“I hurt them, too,” Tony sighed. “Neither of us can deny that.”

“You did,” Rhodey agreed. “But that doesn’t discount what was done to you. There’s no competition here, no scale of wrong. Look me in the eye and tell me hearing a life-changing lie from your best friend’s mouth hurts less than feeling torn between two halves of yourself. There is no greater pain, no greater wrong. There’s just  _ wrong.”  _

“So what?”

“So what? So you’re allowed to be a little pissed off, Tones.”

Tony chuckled. “Oh, I’m pissed.”

“Good.”

“Also sad.”

“Fair.”

“Also very worried because—” Tony twisted in his chair— “where the fuck is the kid and his pet snake?”

Rhodey grinned, releasing Tony’s hand and shifting in his own seat. “I sent them to the East Wing to give you some space when you got back. Peter’s probably asking FRIDAY if there’s any word every two seconds.”

“Can confirm, boss,” FRIDAY’s voice supplied.

“Tell him I’ll come and see him in a moment. Tell him we’re alright.”

“Can do.” FRIDAY’s voice disappeared.

Tony set his coffee down, sliding it across the counter and offhandedly focusing on the scraping noise it made. He shivered. “I was really pissed,” he said after a moment.

Rhodey leaned forward, saying nothing but ready to listen.

“I was angry enough to be petty. I was angry enough to insult. I was angry enough to fight and to draw blood.”

“Do tell.”

“Rogers grabbed me.”

Rhodey stiffened. His fingers curled, flexing like claws. “He did  _ what.” _

“It was fine. He just grabbed my wrist like any normal person would do when they were trying to get someone’s attention—” Rhodey’s glower made Tony sigh and rework the statement. “Yes, fine, not discounting it… he grabbed me, and he wouldn’t let go of me. So I fought.”

“Good.”

“Stop saying that!” Tony slapped the edge of the table, his lip twitching upward. “Nothing about this is good! I  _ attacked  _ an ally. I refused to give them information they need to save the world. I was stuck with the objects of my nightmares in a lab, alone, and I couldn’t do anything but walk away. The moment I couldn’t keep all of them in my gaze at once, I just about panicked. Full-on panic mode, Rhodey-bear.  _ That is not good.”  _

“Are you sure?”

Tony wanted to slap the other man. “How could it  _ possibly  _ good?”

“You found your feet,” Rhodey insisted. “You stood up. And you  _ didn’t  _ panic. One Tony against a half-dozen emotionally destructive individuals were pretty bad odds, Tones. But you beat them.”

“Debatable.”

“How could it have been more successful?” Rhodey asked. “I’m serious. How might you have reacted better?”

Tony glowered. “I would have sat them down, sat in front of them and folded my hands on some sort of table because that makes me look fucking composed. And then I would have explained— _ with diagrams— _ how this whole dimensional-merging thing is going to happen. Like a press conference.”

“Hm. And how would you put together a press conference with thirty seconds notice?”

Tony huffed. “I wouldn’t. I’d haul ass before they could get me in front of a camera. Which I _tried_ to do, by the way.”

“What, the doors lock you in?”

Rolling his eyes, Tony picked up his coffee again. “No, actually, the wizard did.”

“Strange?”

“Is there another wizard hanging around that I wasn’t aware of?” Tony looked around exaggeratedly. “Because I’m damn well up for a replacement.”

 “What happened…?” Rhodey prompted.

“He didn’t answer his phone.”

Rhodey raised an eyebrow. His long fingers drummed on the table before them, and Tony heard the rhythm of sixes encased within it. “And this is making you aggressively gulp coffee because…”

“Because—” Tony took an aggressive gulp of coffee— “we never ask him for  _ anything.  _ Portals, before, but now we don’t need those as it’s legal to get to Wakanda through flight. Hell, I have  _ Loki  _ do more to aid this quest than him, and he’s supposed to be our goddamn trump card!”

“Nope.”

Tony’s tirade cut off. “What?”

“That’s not the reason.”

“How do you know?”

“Because you’re making that face. The ‘I’m deflecting the question’ face.”

“I don’t make that face.”

“Look! You’re doing it again.”

Tony rolled his eyes. He was almost out of coffee. “Fine. I’m angry because I… I expected him to be consistent in this  _ one thing  _ we’ve ever asked him to do. I don’t make him stay here, I don’t make him consult us for research, I don’t consult  _ him  _ for research. I try not to make expectations anymore, but…”

“But you couldn’t help it,” Rhodey finished. “You can’t build a plan without having a couple of things you infer that people will do.”

“Yeah.”

“Hm. And?”

“And I  _ needed—”  _ Tony took a breath. “I needed to get out of there. I needed a fast getaway. I needed the magic, and by extension, I needed Strange.”

“And he didn’t answer the phone.”

“And he didn’t answer the phone,” Tony agreed, sighing. It whistled around the rim of his mug. 

It was easier to be angry at Strange than it was to be angry at what he’d faced in the lab he hadn’t escaped. It was easier, simpler, more rewarding to focus on the petty fury toward a man who already rubbed him the wrong way. Strange had broken a half-promise, and it made Tony stew in something resigned and disappointed and  _ angry.  _

He let himself focus on that. It was easier, that way.

“Well, we’ll see if  _ wizardry  _ is involved in this process again, if I can help it,” Tony growled. “Fuck that.”

“Tony…”

“What.”

“You know that’s irrational, as well as I do.” Rhodey leaned across the table to pat him on the shoulder. “And it’s probably more harmful to you than to him.”

The man had a point; Strange probably wouldn’t even notice. 

“So go talk to him.” Rhodey stood, swiping Tony’s empty mug from his hands. The engineer followed involuntarily as Rhodey walked away with it. 

“There’s no talking to the wizard,” Tony huffed.

“Silence won’t help anyone.”

“I don’t want to help anyone! I just want to pout in a corner and come up with revenge plots.” 

Rhodey rolled his eyes. “Or you could just go to Greenwich and roast him like a shish-kebab. I’m sure that’d be more satisfying.”

It would be, actually. Tony grumbled.

“Record it, when you go,” Rhodey said, giving Tony the look that meant he knew he’d won this particular round. “The kid’s waiting for you.”

And with that, Rhodey ducked out of the kitchen and disappeared.

* * *

Peter didn’t care what it said about how long he’d been waiting there; the moment the door slid open to the room he’d been pacing, he was flying across the room to slam into the man on the other side.

Tony let out a quiet  _ oomf  _ as Peter wrapped his superstrong arms around the man’s shoulders, effectively pinning his upper arms to his sides. Waving restrained limbs in an attempt to return the hug, Tony said, “hi.”

“Hi.” Peter’s voice was a bit muffled.

“I need to breathe.”

“Right.” Stepping away, Peter wrapped his arms around himself instead of his mentor and watched Tony awkwardly straighten his hoodie. “Are you okay?”

“Rhodey took my coffee.”

Peter gave an exaggerated gasp. “Such blasphemy!”

“ _ I know!”  _ Tony spun forward into the center of the room, running his hands through his hair. “How can I be expected to proceed logically with this bullshit without a constant, unending supply of caffeine?”

“Unreasonable demands.”

“Absolutely preposterous.” Tony flopped sideways onto the couch, covering his face with one hand and sighing. 

Perching on the armrest, Peter poked at his toe. “Mr. Stark.”

“What?”

“I want to help.”

Tony sighed. “I know, kid. There isn’t much you can, do, though.”

“I can listen.”

The hand in front of the engineer’s face fell away, replaced with his unreadable amber gaze. There was so much depth in that single expression. It reflected everything, analyzed everything, calculated and perceived and thought. 

Peter poked his toe again. 

“Fine, fine,” Tony huffed. “I don’t have anything to say.”

Peter didn’t believe the man, but he didn’t pry. He knew the urge to dismiss the question, to answer  _ ‘fine’,  _ to say nothing at all—because what could you say? When there was so much that was going wrong inside, but so much more that was trying to convince you things were alright, that you didn’t know what to think. 

Sometimes, a person needed to process. And sometimes, they just needed to be distracted. 

“We figured out the game plan,” Peter began, tentative and sweet, an offering of conversation that wouldn’t hurt.

Tony took it. “I never doubted you for a second.”

“Aw. It was a group effort. ANSLI has four official members now. FRIDAY’s an honorary one.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “ANSLI?”

“Association of Navigational Strategy for the Locating of Infinity. I thought you’d like the acronym.”

Tony grinned, rubbing his hands together. “Oh, I like acronyms.”

“Right? They’re great. So anyway, we decided our first destination is Asgard. Loki will use his shapeshifting to slip into the vault and nab the Tesseract before himself-from-this-timeline notices.”

“Okay.” Tony nodded. “And we’re going there first because…”

“Because Asgard has a time limit. Thor and Loki are gonna find out they have a murder sister from hell in the next few weeks, and then she’s gonna come and take over Asgard.”

Tony blinked.

Peter slumped off the edge of the armrest, bouncing into the cushions of the couch and squashing Tony’s ankles. “I know,” he said. “It’s a mess.”

“So we avoid the hell child.”

“Avoiding the hell child is the goal,” Peter agreed.

“I do  _ not  _ have enough brainpower to unpack that right now,” Tony groaned. His hand game back up to his face, and Peter unconsciously flicked at the man’s kneecaps. “So where to after Asgard?”

“Well, at Asgard, we’re gonna hack into whatever universal matrix the space-people are going by.” Peter waved his arms expansively. “And then we’ll use it to find out where Vormir is.”

“Solid, alright.”

“That’ll take time; perhaps enough for Thor to have finished dealing with what’s happening on Asgard. We use Loki’s memories of the past—the future, in this case, which is  _ whack  _ if you think about it—and track him down. Then we ask him about the Reality Stone, and go after  _ that.” _

“Which leaves power.” Tony held up one finger.

“Exactly. We don’t have any idea where to start with that, so we figure the best course of action would be to go after the people on the list.” Peter listed off: “Peter Quill, Gamora, Mantis, Groot, Rocket, Drax, and Nebula, along with Carol Danvers and a couple of others.”

“I can see that,” Tony agreed. “We can start in on that during our travel to Vormir using the database that we hypothetically are going to come up with.”

“Right.”

“And when are we going to kill Thanos?”

Peter paused, taken aback by the question. “What?”

“When are we going to kill him? We can’t merge the universes and bring Thanos back to life. We have to kill him before we snap to bring the dimensions together.” Tony’s voice was cool, casual, like he was simply discussing weekend plans and not a Titan-killing quest. 

“I… don’t know.” Peter shrugged. “I didn’t think about that.”

“Hm. Well, something has to be open for surprises.” 

“I guess.” Peter sighed. “Better for things to happen the way you planned them, though.”

“Yeah.” Tony echoed his sigh—it sounded remarkably similar. “Better if  _ people  _ happen the way you expected, too.”

“Free will is an illusion,” Peter said instantly.

Tony raised his eyebrow.

Peter forcibly kept the smile off his face. “It’s all a pre-programmed story, Mr. Stark. The Matrix and all that.”

Tony rolled his eyes, sitting up to flick Peter’s head. The boy laughed. “You’re unbelievable,” Tony huffed. “This can’t be the matrix; magic is only wielded by assholes and it manifests in muddy colors.”

“Multiverse and stuff,” Peter said helpfully. “Strange could be Neo. We’ll never know.”

Tony’s glower darkened, and Peter’s mood soured slightly. What had he said?

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s just… I hate it when Rhodey’s right.”

“What?” 

Tony pulled his legs out from beneath Peter, grunting with the effort, and stood. He straightened his hoodie and gave Peter a set of thumbs-up before striding for the door. Peter sat up.

“Where are you going?”

“Red or blue, kid” was Tony’s answer. “I’ve got a choice to offer someone.”

And then he was gone, just as soon as he’d come, leaving Peter bouncing on a soft couch and utterly confused.

Well. At least he’d smiled. They had a plan, a strategy, and a spaceship, with a team growing out of what had been just Peter and Loki for so many weeks. Maybe things would be okay. 

Maybe they could still make this work. 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The ending was supposed to be hopeful and I realize now it just sounds very very veRY ominous. Oh well.
> 
> Tune in next time for Tony and Stephen bitching at each other--but on heavy topics.


	90. Not a Robot

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now, the much-awaited chapter 90 (!). I had so much fun with this. Enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

The totem in his hand was slick with blood when Stephen stumbled back into the Sanctum. 

Dimension hopping was never a simple matter, with navigation resting on both sling-ring and a relic taken from the desired destination. The totem provided direction, an energy signature from which to portal, and could be anything from a weapon to a wilted piece of grass.

Stephen had broken this totem. A Queen’s teeth were sharp and unforgiving and the silver leaf had been shredded almost instantly.

So had Stephen.

The sorcerer braced his hands on the library table, their mangled bandages stained and scrappy, as the portal turned aggressively to sparks. In the Black and White battle, he’d seen an end to their constant fight. He’d seen the repercussions it would cast across their whole world. 

He didn’t care if it was fate. Creatures were dying, and they didn’t even realize.

He was never going on a solo scouting mission ever again.

“At least we fixed it, huh?” Stephen said, grimace softening as he reached out to let the Cloak twine around his fingers. “Oroborus restored?”

The tools he’d needed to do so had already been falling into place, and the final piece had been the Queen. Apparently, the Pawn-to-Queen rule so important to a game of chess was reflected in that world—but the capability of shifting wasn’t exclusive to Pawns. The magic was nonspecific; a wild, transformative power with no direction and hardly any control. 

Stephen had experience with that. 

The Cloak bobbed, brushing up against his cheeks. It avoided his collar and sternum carefully. Pure red fabric was darkened in patches of violet and scarlet blood from their two separate sets of enemies, and Stephen thought it must be heavy. Right. Give an update to Wong and the Masters, then wash the Cloak.

Stephen swayed back upright, blinking away the sparkling darkness that crept at the edges of his vision. The Cloak tried to take his weight, but the pressure on his left lapel made Stephen hiss. Quickly, apologetically, the Cloak released him.

“Hm…” Stephen’s gaze flickered to his relic. It looked sad floating awkwardly beside him, and Stephen grinned reassuringly. “Don’t worry; you’re still the best,” he said.  “Would you mind getting Wong for me? I don’t want to sign myself up for demonstrating by going over there.”

The Cloak, perking up, saluted with a flick of its collar and zoomed off. Stephen watched it go with a smile that quickly dissolved into a grimace. 

He really, truly just wanted a nap. Possibly some food, though he wasn’t picky on the order. His hands were shaking, his ears throbbed, his collar burned with an intense pain, he couldn’t remember the song of the day, and unconsciousness sounded very appealing. 

None of it mattered anyway. Permanence was an illusion, agency was futile; maybe the wounds would still be there when he awoke, and maybe they wouldn’t. Stephen couldn’t help but believe the latter, despite all he did to break the loop that existed in his subconscious. It was so undeniably obvious that he didn’t even think to dispute the truth.

None of it mattered.

But the Cloak would be back soon, and so would Wong. His librarian wouldn’t wait through Stephen’s nap, though he might join him for a snack. Stephen rubbed his face, sternum and shoulder stinging at the movement, and wandered out of the library toward the kitchen. 

So it was that he was in the foyer when there was a demanding, conspicuous knock at the Sanctum door.

Stephen lifted his eyes to the heavens. 

He waved a hand, magic slamming the door wide. There was an extra creak to the hinges as the sunlight wormed its way into the Sanctum, responding automatically to Stephen’s mood, and the high-pitched noise furthered the discomfort in his ears. 

Stephen figured it was safe to diagnose himself with tympanic membrane perforation at this point. He could still hear, and there was no longer drainage from his ear, so the damage was likely non-extensive and would heal on it own over the next few weeks. Annoying, but not debilitating.  

Tony Stark, on the other hand, was edging into the lethal category.

“What do you want?” Stephen snapped, rubbing at the outside of his ear. Dried blood flaked off onto his fingers.

It was the wrong thing to say, apparently, as Stark’s already irritated face descended into something thunderous. “Are you a part of this mission or not?” the genius demanded. 

Stephen, unphased, crossed his arms. “You tell me.”

“Oh, easy answer; you’re not.”

It was easy to convince himself that the flicker of hurt in his gut was instead irritation. “Great, glad we cleared that up. I’ll see you tomorrow when there’s a problem you can’t solve.”

His dramatic attempt to close the door in Stark’s face was undermined by the man stepping into the doorway, practically snarling. “You  _ missed it,  _ actually. The problem that needed solving was yesterday.”

Stephen blinked.

“What part of  _ fate of the universe  _ do you not understand, Strange? Is saving everything some kind of a joke to you?”

_ What?  _ Indignation flared where Stephen’s confusion was growing, and he snapped, “this universe is just one of the many I have to watch over—and those aren’t being self-entitled douchebags.”

_ “My apologies,  _ then,” Stark hissed, “for attempting to involve you in your own quest.”

How many times were they going to bring that up? Stephen had enough problems with his present self—he didn’t need people throwing the actions of his future self at his feet. 

“Last time I checked, I involved myself.”

“Yeah.” Stark chuckled darkly. “Heaven forbid you actually help us with something important.”

Stephen resisted the urge to throw his hands into the air. “When haven’t I? When have I failed to solve your needed problems? I don’t see what more you could possibly want from me.”

“Maybe some agency every now and again!” Stark took a breath. “Look, I know you don’t want to help us, but—”

Stephen cut him off. “What?”

“You don’t care about the mission or the timeline, it’s fine, but—”

“Excuse me?” Stephen hoped his tone matched every firework of exasperation that never made it to his face. 

Stark’s words were the same. “Am I not being  _ clear?” _

“Last I checked, you didn’t want my help. In fact, you actively rejected it!” Stephen waved a hand. The quick movement brought a flicker of nausea to his gut, and he blinked away the dizziness. “I’m simply trying to be respectful.”

_ “Respectful?  _ You’ve avoided us, ignored us, and provided almost nothing—”

“What do you  _ want,  _ then?”

Stark glared, his whiskey gaze deep and piercing against the winter bustling of Greenwich. “Any sign, any at all, that you give a shit.”

Oh.

So he was just another one of them who didn’t understand.

The righteous defense that Stephen had felt drained away to something resigned, and his usual controlled drawl fell across his words as he said, “so that’s it. You don’t think I care.”

“I know you don’t.”

“You think I don’t care about the fate of two universes and life as we know it.”

Stark stubbornly did not shift. “There’s been little evidence to the contrary.”

“You are so wrong it physically hurts,” Stephen deadpanned. “Let’s start at the beginning, shall we? Or how about  _ anywhere,  _ anytime I portaled you at any whim?”

“And then disappeared, for weeks, after doing  _ that and only that.  _ The exact bare minimum of anything that could be asked of you.”

Stephen blinked. “Because you wanted me to.”

“I didn’t—”

_ “No.”  _ Stephen cut him off so sharply it sliced through the icy air. “You don’t get to deny that. You dislike me. You didn’t want my help, would have preferred not to need it in the first place and not to ask for it ever, and you wanted me gone. So I left.”

“It doesn’t matter—”

“What doesn’t matter?” Stephen demanded. “That you’re actively hostile and unwelcoming toward my assistance?”

“It doesn't matter what I think!” Stark plowed through Stephen’s words, forcing his own into control of the conversation. “It matters what this universe  _ needs. _ It matters that, much as I hate to admit it, we can’t do this without you. _ ” _

_ There it is again. He doesn’t want to be here—he didn’t ever want to be here. _

Stephen spoke slowly. “I am perfectly aware of my disposition. I am perfectly aware that I am not easy to get along with, and frankly I like it that way.”

“I can say the same thing, Strange, and you don’t see me sulking. This mission needs you, and I’m willing to bet it needs far more than you’ve been  _ inclined  _ to share with us. Maybe we don’t deserve your help, but the universe does, and I’m here to ask why the  _ fuck  _ you’ve been disregarding it!”

Disregarding it? 

Dropping everything to provide assistance in the rare moments Stark needed his help was disregarding his universal responsibilities? Trying to respect the boundaries of a man suffering from PTSD was disregarding his universal responsibilities? Appearing as little as possible due to the fact that his skills and the things he could provide  _ actively triggered  _ severe panic attacks was disregarding his universal responsibilities? Avoiding an environment that was better off without him was disregarding his universal responsibilities?

A tired, hungry, injured, overwhelmed, unstable sorcerer had reached his limit.

Stark was still talking, but Stephen had stopped listening. The thundering in his head was far too loud, anyway.

_ “I’m not a robot, Stark!”  _

An engineer’s words choked into silence.

Stephen’s gaze was blurring at the edges, but he focused every ounce of strength into his expression as he glared at the man in front of him. “I’m not a robot. Believe it or not, I don’t want to be around people who don’t want to be around me. Believe it or not, I’m disinclined to subject myself to a constant state of hostility. Believe it or not, I’m capable of noticing and respecting when the mere sight of my magic triggers the memories of a traumatized man!”

Stark flinched. Stephen didn’t care.

His breath came fast, his vision actively swimming now. “Make up your mind. If you want my help, I’ll give it, but if you want to avoid me, let me have the same courtesy.”

Stark’s eyes had widened—but he wasn’t looking at Stephen’s face anymore. He was looking at his chest.

“Strange—”

Why was the doorway tilting so drastically? Stephen leaned on it to try and keep himself oriented. 

But he had to make Stark understand. Fixated on it, Stephen met the man’s eyes. 

“I know I don’t belong with your team,” Stephen explained. “But I’d rather not be constantly reminded. I’m not a robot.”

The world gave a particularly violent lurch, and Stephen found himself kneeling.

“I’m not… I’m not… ”

* * *

There was blood on Strange’s clothes. 

It was soaking through the front of his shirt, turning the navy a deep violet, and that was unacceptable, absolutely unacceptable. This was supposed to be a discussion, a long-overdue communication with a team member who wasn’t pulling their weight, but Strange was bleeding and Tony  _ did not deal with bleeding wizards—  _

Strange suddenly crumpled, his hand sliding down the doorframe. He was shaking his head, as though trying to shake away an insect, and Tony saw red around his ears.

Why hadn’t he noticed that before? Why hadn’t he noticed whatever  _ gaping fucking wound  _ was leaking blood all over the sorcerer’s front?

“Strange,” Tony said, instantly kneeling down before the mumbling wizard. “Strange!”

Strange lifted tired, clouded eyes to Tony’s, and beneath them was that constant, unending determination that had driven his words. Words Tony had never expected. 

_ ‘I know I don’t belong with your team, but I’d rather not be constantly reminded.’ _

He couldn’t help but recall the snappish dismissals, the abrupt disrespect he hadn’t thought twice about. He couldn’t help but wonder just how many times thanking Strange hadn’t even occurred to him. After all, it wasn’t like the sorcerer seemed to care…

He’d hardly seemed human.

_ ‘I’m not a robot.’ _

Strange was shivering weakly, his skin even paler than normal. His tunic shifted with his movements, smearing red across his collarbone, and Tony cursed. The December air could not be helping—where was that Cloak you needed it?  

“What the hell happened?” Tony hissed as he stood, glancing behind him to see how large a crowd he’d gathered. By some miracle, no strangers had noticed the strange exchange on the stairs of the strange building.

“Interdimensional beasts have sharp claws,” Strange slurred. 

“You were fighting a—and you answered the door? No wonder your priorities are so utterly  _ whacked up!”  _ Tony kept talking, even as he pressed a hand to the door and forced it open wider, then half-dragged, half-coaxed Strange inside. “Is it still here? Do I need to call a suit?”

“Not fighting it anymore, obviously.” Strange managed to make the coughing words sound condescending. “Just got back. Scouting mission.”

“Scouting mission,” Tony repeated flatly.

A flicker of a grin, like he’d just referenced an inside joke. “I know,” Strange said. “Never doing one of those again.”

There was blood on Tony’s hands as he reached out to pull away the soaked fabric from Strange’s wound. The wizard hissed as the garment came free with a wet  _ squelch.  _ It was loose enough to pull away from Strange’s collar, and Tony bit his lip at the three bloody rents that marred the skin beneath it.

“Do you have any sense of self-preservation? Any at all?” Tony demanded. 

“No.”

“Thought not. Y’know, coming back home after a mission is usually when you say,  _ ‘huh, I’m bleeding profusely from my chest, maybe I should DO SOMETHING ABOUT THAT.’” _

Strange glanced down at his shoulder and shrugged. The movement stretched the skin and encouraged another soaking pulse of blood to build above it, and Tony made a grunting noise somewhere between exasperation and concern.

“I was going to get some food,” the wizard explained. “And then you knocked on the door.”

“And it’s a good thing I did!” Tony looked around for something to address the wound. “For future reference, blood comes before food.”

“I strongly disagree.”

“Uh-huh. Where’s your Cloak?”

“Getting Wong.”

Tony frowned. “What?”

Strange waved a hand—thankfully the one not attached to his injured collar. “My friend. The librarian. He was teaching yesterday and maybe he’s still teaching…”  
“Teaching who?”

“The novices.”

“You have novices?” Tony was genuinely surprised.

Strange raised his eyebrows. “What, did you think I was the only one?”

“Well… in this timeline, maybe.” He remembered seeing youths in the Stalk the last time he’d spent an unfortunate adventure there. But this building had been so empty…

In the single time Tony’d been here.

_ ‘I know I don’t belong with your team, but I’d rather not be constantly reminded.’ _

Maybe the wizard had a point.

“I’m still mad at you, you know,” Tony stated as he took his teeth to the bottom of his already ripped hoodie. The sound of the fabric ripping made both wizard and engineer cringe. 

“Likewise.” Strange narrowed his eyes as Tony fumbled with the scrap of fabric. “We do have bandages.”

“You couldn’t have said that earlier?”

Strange grunted, bracing his hands on the floor of the Sanctum and pushing himself so he was a little more upright against the wall. He reached into the folds of his bloody tunic, and Tony glimpsed strips of old, filthy cloth still clinging to his wrists and fingers. The mechanic frowned. 

It was half a second before Strange’s hand was reappearing with a curl of slightly stained bandages. Tony raised his eyebrow, wondering, “so you just have first aid supplies in your pocket perpetually.”

Strange regarded him, unimpressed. “Yes.”

“Okay.”

“What are you still doing here?” Strange unwound a swath of fabric, and the movement was easy and practiced despite the shaking of his hands. 

“Are you serious? Making sure you don’t fucking bleed out!”

“This is in no way a lethal wound. I would have to explicitly pursue making the injury worse to—”

“You aren’t a robot.”

Strange’s words faded.

Tony shifted his weight off his heels, no longer crouching but sitting on the floor of the Sanctum. “You’re bleeding. What am I supposed to do, shut the door and leave in a huff? I’m not  _ that  _ much of a bastard.”

“Oh I beg to differ.”

“Ouch.” Tony pressed a hand to his chest in mock offense. “You wound me.”

“Pretty sure that’s my blood, actually.”

“Oh, did I—” Tony looked down at his front. There was indeed a bloody handprint across his hoodie and t-shirt, and he grimaced. “Ugh, I got it all over me. This is my favorite shirt, I’ll have you know.”

“Hm.” Strange lifted a hand, and between one blink and the next, the stain had disappeared. Only a slight, instinctual flinch caught Tony’s form at the tingle of proximal magic. 

“Nice,” Tony observed, carefully not touching the newly restored fabric with his bloody hands.

Strange didn’t answer, already occupied trying to wrap his chest and collar with his single available hand. The movements were awkward, pained, and Tony reached out somewhat reluctantly to help pull his tunic out of the way for easier access to the wound. He noticed the sharp angles of the sorcerer's scapula and clavicle, protruding not in an unhealthy way but definitely in an unusual one. 

The scratches were ragged, bruised around the edges and varying in depth. Tony could read the size of the beast from them, the placement of the paw, and winced once more. The claws must have been serrated. 

“Shit, wizard, that’s gotta hurt,” Tony murmured as Strange tucked the end of the bandage into itself and secured it. 

“I’m fine,” Strange answered easily, though he let his head fall back against the wall and his eyes drift closed.

“Can’t let you do that.” Tony poked the man’s uninjured shoulder. “Open.”

Strange cracked an eye, head lolling to the side. “Nonlethal wound, I already told you. It’s bound, the bleeding is edging toward stopping. If I don’t move, it should stop in about ten minutes.”

“Excuse me if I don’t take your word for it.”

“I have an MD.”

“Shock and awe.” Tony’s expression didn’t change. “I don’t care.”

Strange huffed, his lips twitching up. “You wouldn’t.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?”

“Don’t you have like seven PhDs?” Strange didn’t sound very confident on the number, and for good reason.

“Nah, that’s Bruce.” 

“Oh. Right.” A frown. “I should’ve known that.”

“Yes you should’ve!” Tony grinned. “I thought you were a genius.”

“Don’t flatter yourself. The classification of ‘genius’ is not how many of Tony Stark’s credentials one can name off the top of their head.”

Tony winked. “And that’d be where you were wrong, Strange. Not a true genius, so you wouldn’t know.”

“I seriously don’t know how you fit your head into that helmet,” Strange sighed.

The words came easily, almost on memory. “Admit it. You should have ducked out when I told you to. I tried to bench you. You refused.”

Strange opened his mouth, then closed it again. “What?”

Tony frowned. “Oh. Sorry, that’s… not right.”

Strange opened his other eye, watching Tony curiously. “Dream?”

“Must’ve been,” Tony sighed. “I’ve been getting snippets of Stalk memories, but I can never recall them when I wake.”

“Hm.”

“You? You said you’d dreamed about me when we met.” Tony resisted the urge to make a rather inappropriate joke and continued. “Are they still common?”

“I don’t remember anything useful.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Strange observed him somewhat moodily. “It’s what I answered.”

Tony raised his hands. “Touchy subject, fine, I won’t bite. But you’ll be explaining when you’re less brink-of-death looking.”

“I told you, I’m not—never mind.”

Tony grinned. Holding Strange’s somewhat unfocused gaze, he crossed his legs, getting comfortable. The librarian and loyal bedsheet hadn’t returned, and the wizard was still injured, no matter how adamant he was that he was fine. There were still quite a few things that needed discussion, anyway. 

Tony didn’t intend to go anywhere.

  
  
  
  


 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :DDDDD
> 
> If there was no one here who thought of that scene from Good Omens when Stephen was magicing away the bloodstain on Tony's clothes I have failed you and myself. 
> 
> Hope you liked!


	91. For Emergencies

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for unapologetic banter. (Unapologetic by me. I don't apologize for this.)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_December 2016_ **

 

By the time Wong arrived, Stephen succeeded both in staying awake and in rebinding a wound no longer bleeding. He had not, however, succeeded in driving Tony Stark away from the Sanctum, despite his best efforts. 

“Okay, Wong’s here, you can  _ leave now,”  _ Stephen said for the umpteenth time as the sparking edges of the portal appeared at the apex of the stairs before them. 

Stark was braiding the strings of his hoodie with a third strand made of some flexible nanotech. He didn’t so much as glance at Stephen when he spoke. “Nope.”

“Stark.”

“I’m not leaving—not until I get some answers.”

Stephen strangled the air in front of him with shaking hands. “I  _ answered your questions.” _

“Sure you did. But now whoever this is can answer a few more of them.” With the final words, Stark pivoted on the floor and lifted a hand to indicate Wong. “Hey, other wizard. And Cloak; I missed you, buddy.”

The Cloak, floating a bit ahead of Wong, seemed pleased at Stark’s sentiment, despite its sarcasm. It wrapped a corner around Stark’s outstretched hand in greeting. Then, a clasp tilted toward Stephen, it observed the state of its master.

It was by his side in an instant. 

Stephen stroked the seam where its shoulders met its collar, a comfortable smile touching his lips. The smile faded as Wong’s voice gave a pointed declaration: “welcome to this realm then, Strange.”

“I just got back,” Stephen explained. Trying to keep his voice steady only made it sound all the rougher, and he couldn’t quite look Wong in the eye.

Stark interrupted before Stephen could say anything more. “Your friend is injured,” he informed Wong. “Quite impressively.” 

“He does that,” Wong muttered, then blinked at Stark, as though noticing him for the first time.

Stark picked up on the expression and waved mockingly. “Hello.”

“Wh—did he call you?” Wong asked, pointing at Stephen.

“No,” both Stark and Stephen said simultaneously. Stark glanced back at him, and Stephen made sure to glower extra darkly. 

Wong crossed the last few feet to where the two men were sitting, kneeling down himself. His booted feet clicked against the hardwood Sanctum floor. Dark brown eyes furrowed in what could have been concern—disapproving concern—and Wong reached out toward Stephen’s bloody tunic. “What happened?”  
“The Queen.”

Wong’s disapproval deepened. “It was a scouting mission!”

Rolling his eyes, Stephen weakly swatted the librarian's hand away. “I didn’t do it on purpose! What, you think I involved myself in an eternal battle just for the fun of it?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Ha-ha. At least it wasn’t a Knight.”

“Yes, then we would have delt with a severed clavicle as well,” Wong sighed. 

Behind Wong, Stark raised a hand. “Um.”

Both sorcerers ignored him. Stephen said, “I fixed it, though. The regenerative Pawn-to-Queen magic duplicated the fallen Blacks, keeping the sides balanced so the Oroborus fight could continue.”

Stark raised his hand higher.

“What about the Whites?” Wong asked. He pulled Stephen’s tunic away from his shoulder for a moment, observed the bandages, and nodded in curt approval. 

“It wasn’t my place to rewrite their knowledge. I left their understanding of death intact, though I hope I managed to indirectly show them the power of their sense-weapon.”

“Um.”

Stephen finally turned to Stark. “Yes?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Wong turned his impassive gaze on the billionaire. “Strange is a sorcerer. Did you think that meant nothing more than books and spells?”

If Stephen took a  _ bit  _ of pleasure in the image of Tony Stark fumbling for words, he managed not to show it. 

“It never occurred to him to think it,” Stephen said, trying to decide if the words were meant harmfully. He wasn’t sure anymore. “Which is why we’re currently sitting next to the door, and I’m unable to drive him out.”

Stark crossed his arms, but Wong spoke before he could. “He came while you were off-world, thinking you’d be available?”

Stephen shook his head. “Nah. Want to explain what you’re doing here, Stark?” he prodded with saccharine sweetness. 

Stark flipped him off. “I came to kick this wizard’s ass into high-gear. It’s not like he’s been super helpful.”

Wong gave Stephen a look. No, he gave Stephen,  _ the  _ look, the look that was an  _ ‘I told you so’  _ and a  _ ‘seriously?’  _ and an  _ ‘everything will be fine’  _ and one more  _ ‘I told you so’  _ wrapped up for good measure. Taking a page from Stark’s (still open) book, Stephen curled his own shaking fingers into a vulgar gesture.

Wong raised his eyebrows, then flipped Stark off to complete the circle. For a long moment, they just sat there in a triangle of middle-fingers before Stephen sighed and lowered his hand. His fingers were sore already.

“I know, Wong,” he sighed.

“Know what?” Stark wondered. 

“Strange here is a dumbass.” Wong’s face didn’t change.

Stark grinned, winking at Stephen again— _ damn him— _ and turning to fully face Wong. “Well, what else is obvious?”

“Explain,” Wong demanded by way of response. Stark blinked. Wong added, “everything. Everything we’ve missed.”

And Stark did.

* * *

“I called you.” Tony was finishing the story, leaving the best—by which he meant ‘most cataclysmic’—for last. “Apparently you were off gallivanting through other dimensions, so that was a bad idea. But I didn’t know that. So I was relying on a help that you couldn’t give.”

“And you came to my door to yell at me because  _ somehow  _ I’m responsible for you being in the wrong place at the wrong time?” Strange raised an eyebrow.

“Get it right. You’re responsible for not getting me  _ out  _ of said place,” Tony clarified.

“Ah. Because you’re incapable of getting anywhere on your own.”

“I can climb out of this pit your digging fast enough to bury you in it.”

Wong, behind them, gripped his temples with a sigh. Neither man so much as glanced at him. The Cloak had drifted into a curl at Strange’s elbow like some cuddly sort of pet. 

Strange raised his eyebrows. “You think the Master of the New York Sanctum would be caught dead in the dirt? Oh, I guess you’re already here…”

“Dirt, filth—blood definitely! Every time I come over here your bleeding to death.”

“And every time I come over you’re stepping into a panic attack. Good thing this hole I’m digging isn’t in spacetime…”

Tony bristled. “One instance doesn't make a pattern.”

“And how many, pray tell, is proof?”

“That your a misanthrope? How long have we known each other? Oh, I’d say three instances.”

“Only for an acceptable data set. More trials may prove necessary for scientific accuracy.” Strange’s deadpan was lilting, some mix of offence and amusement.

“You calling me unpredictable?”

“Improbable,” Strange corrected.

Tony huffed. “Careful, Strange, that was almost a compliment.”

“My bad; would ‘dubious’ be the correct adjective?”

“I think what you’re looking for is ‘incredible’.” 

Strange gave an exaggerated wince. “Ooo… has no one told you? The correct pronunciation of that word is ‘insolent’.”

“‘Genius’.”

“‘Pretentious’.”

“‘Prodigy.’” Tony crossed his arms. 

“Now you’re just reading off the Wikipedia page.”

“Googled me, have you?”

“In the same search I discovered  _ precisely  _ how best to strangle a billionaire.”

Tony pressed a hand to his chest. “You could have simply asked. I recommend decapitation for wizards.”

“Oh, there’d be easier ways to kill me. You could always let your presence do the trick.” Strange lifted a lip in a half snarl. Tony did the same. 

“Oh-ho? Well, at least I have to be up-close to kill. Your face could drop a man at any distance!” 

“Any man? Well, it’s not working on you. Guess that means you don’t meet the criteria.”

“Sorry, I meant one of your own species. Don’t worry, I’ll be careful not to let any of the aliens out of Damage Control.”

“Is  _ that  _ where your family’s been all this time?”

“My parents have nothing to do with my legacy, thank you very much.”

“Yes, I’d image they’d want nothing to do with you.” 

Tony huffed. “At least my ancestors didn’t mate with a rodent!”

“At least I—”

_ “For the love of everything holy in this Sanctum, shut up!”  _ The stoic librarian had apparently had enough, practically throwing his hands between Tony and Strange. Reveling in having the last word, however subjectively, Tony resisted the urge to stick his tongue out at the injured sorcerer.

Wong continued, “none of this… squabbling is getting us anywhere!”

“Did we have a destination?” Strange wondered, sounding genuinely lost. He blinked, uncomfortably slowly. 

“Yes,” Tony provided. He didn’t know where that might be, but the look of relief that Wong sent him was definitely worth it. Strange’s glower told him the other sorcerer wasn’t buying the act, however. 

“We were trying to get  _ you _ —” Wong gestured at Strange— “on the world-saving team.”

“We were?” Tony blurted. 

Wong gave him a look that Tony was sorely tempted to refer to with a capital letter. “Because 2017 begins in two days, and we do not have time for this.” Wong gestured again, this time to the entirety of Strange’s form. 

_ Shit, it is in two days.  _ Tony was behind schedule. 

“We do have a spaceship completely through the design stage. Digital prototyping is done, too,” Tony offered. “The warp-core is compatible with the rest of our tech, and the timeline has been calculated. Although…” He glanced down toward the strange, double ring on both sorcerers’ hands. “It could save me some effort if you explained those portaling capabilities of yours.”

Wong and Strange looked at each other. 

“By all means.” Strange extended a hand in Wong’s direction.

“I spent all morning teaching the novices,” the librarian replied. “You explain.”

Strange sighed, but obliged. “Fine. Portaling is just the channeling of dimensional energy within your own realm. In order to break open a gateway, you need to know  _ intimately  _ how that location’s energy feels. Thus, you need to have seen where you’re going.”

“Okay… So once you see the spaceship, you can jump back and forth between here and Earth?” That would be ideal; supplies could be transported that way. And he wouldn’t have to spend however many months in close proximity to the baffling wizard.

“Not exactly. Portals are stationary.”

“Ah.”

“Yeah.” Strange went to shrug, then winced and stopped the movement. Wong’s hand found his other shoulder in a smooth, familiar movement. Strange continued, “the spaceship would be moving at lightspeed, so it would slice itself through my portal before I could so much as become aware that I’d created it.”

“But if we stopped the ship?”

Strange nodded. “Possible, in that case.”

“Though extremely taxing,” Wong added. “Portaling across light years is harmful to one’s own energy and concentration.”

“I could do it.”

Wong glowered at the other sorcerer. 

“Okay, okay, don’t fight,” Tony chuckled. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“For emergencies,” Wong stated.

“For necessities.”

_ “Emergencies.” _

“Wong.” Strange looked at his friend, and Tony was almost convinced a telepathic conversation stretched before him in the long second of silence that followed. The Cloak, attune, ruffled and lifted its collar. 

“Fine,” Wong sighed. “I just do not want another incident like Hong Kong.”

Tony only noticed the stiffening of Strange’s spine because he was sitting so close.

“This is nothing like Hong Kong,” the other sorcerer said flatly. 

“It is you…” Wong glanced at Tony, and the engineer bristled. He could practically  _ see  _ Wong editing his words to keep a secret. “Taking unnecessary risks.”

“Unnecessary?” Strange barked. “You were the one insisting I get more involved!”

“And you were the one insisting you weren’t some nameless sorcerer to be used and ignored!”

Tony, fully confused at the references to a conversation he hadn’t been partial to, interrupted in Wong’s direction, “you tried to get him to help us?”

“I did.”

“I  _ have been helping you!” _

Tony rubbed his face. “Whatever. Anyway, we’d loose too much time and fuel decelerating the ship to a complete stop for you to portal. It’s exponential—”

“E equals mc squared, yes, we know.” Strange waved a hand.

Tony continued, ignoring him, “so we we’d up more efficient just staying at twenty times the speed of light and  _ booking it  _ at a constant velocity.”

“I’ll be on the ship, then,” Strange said with a sigh.

“And so will I.” Wong nodded.

Both Tony and Strange stopped short. “What?”

“You need all the help you can get.”

“No,” Tony said, and Wong whipped his head toward the genius. Tony elaborated, “we need you here to secure certain events in the timeline.”

“What events?”

“Loki told me Thor and past-Loki will end up here, seeking help locating Odin,” Tony said. “He remembers speaking to this one—” he pointed at Strange— “but as long as  _ someone  _ is here, the timeline should remain unaltered.”

Wong snorted. “Any number of Masters can provide that.”

Stephen shook his head. “They have their own Sanctums. And it’s a temporal locating spell—only you can pull it off with as much accuracy as I.”

“I…fine.” Wong’s perpetual scowl deepened. “Though let it be known I don’t like it.”

“It’s known,” Strange said. He closed his eyes again, and the movement was somewhat labored. 

Tony focused back on the sorcerer, eyes skating over his injured form. Strange was sweating slightly, pale in an unusual, sickly way, though his voice didn’t reflect it. The bloody, filthy robes didn’t do much to alleviate his air of dishevelment. But his wound hadn’t started bleeding again, as far as Tony could tell. 

“You really have no sense of self-preservation,” Tony muttered as he climbed to his feet.

“Tell me about it,” Wong sighed. 

“By the way—” Tony began.

Strange rolled his eyes. “Let me guess; you’re still angry at me?”

“Less so,” Tony admitted. “I was going to say that for the record, I’m sorry.”

Strange blinked. 

Tony masked the snap of genuinity with another comment. “That comes with interest, by the way. I’ll be expecting my apology back later.”

“Ah, of course,” Strange snorted.

“I’ll be making my leave, then,” Tony began. He went to turn, and the Cloak seemed to droop slightly. Tony wondered if it was sad to see him go. He then proceeded to dismiss the thought immediately.

_ “Finally,”  _ Strange said pointedly. 

Tony flipped him off yet again. “Make an effort, if you would? We really do need your help.”

Before Tony could reach the door and shamelessly escape into the city to think this over, Wong’s voice stopped him. “Stark.”

“What is it now?”

“Will you appreciate it?”

“What?”

Wong’s face didn’t change. “His help. Will you appreciate it.”

“Um… yes?”

“See that you do. Strange has no obligation to you; none of us do. But he is perfectly willing to forge one, if you are to allow it.”

_ “He  _ is still here,” Strange said pointedly, thankfully rescuing Tony from the need to respond to the librarian’s statement. “Please ignore Wong.”

But the look of pure, unbridled command and veiled threat on Wong’s face told Tony rather  _ definitively  _ that he was not to be ignored. This was a man willing to go to great lengths to protect his friend. Tony could respect that—did respect it. And almost feared it.

“I will,” he said, and fled the Sanctum. 

He left the sorcerers to sort out who the words had been meant for. 

  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone has read Words of Radiance, you'll know what I'm talking about.
> 
> ANYWAY thanks for reading, and I hope you liked!


	92. Objective Aesthetic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disney was involved
> 
>  
> 
> But then, Disney is always involved these days

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

Three days later, Tony Stark was back on a plane to Wakanda. 

He was to be late—the New Year had come and gone, along with the date he’d given to the Rogues as the end of his silent treatment. That didn’t bother him. What did bother him was the little string of text beneath the time on his phone screen that said  _ 2017,  _ reminding him with every other blink that he was behind, that Thanos was growing closer, that he had spent too much time stalling. 

Now he was flying over the last stretch of Africa toward the final push to reach the universe. 

And this time, he wasn’t alone. 

Three teenagers were singing in horrible acapella to various _Disney_ songs in the row next to his, their paperwork clutched in excited hands. Their passports hadn’t been necessary in Tony’s quinjet, and shouldn’t be when they landed, but it was best to be prepared. The back of the plane was stuffed with the beginnings of their new lives—a semester worth of memories to be made.

Well, for two of them. One, the slim, curly-haired boy next to the window had a single suitcase and a backpack beneath his seat. 

Tony was still harboring a quiet dream that he might be able to change that. That Peter might be staying in Wakanda, on Earth. 

He didn’t have a lot of hope for it.

Sitting in front the off-key high schoolers, May and Pepper were chatting amicably in low tones. Tony wished he could hear their words, but the screeching attempt to mimic the voice of unknown actors deafened him to them. Loki was draped over the back of Peter’s chair as a lazy looking black cat. His ears flicked as they were offhandedly scratched by Vision, maroon nose buried in a book. Happy was fast asleep a seat behind him. Rhodey, on his way there, was glowering at the back of the singing teenagers’ heads.

And Tony himself was slumped against a window, tie loose around his neck, singing along at the top of his lungs.

_ “‘Time is racing towards us! Till the huns! Arrive!” _

Peter let out a yelping  _ “huh!”  _ to back them up. 

_ “Heed my every order! And you  _ might  _ survive!” _

_ “Huh!” _

_ “Your unsuited for the rage of war, so pack up. Go home. You’re through. Somehow I’ll… make a man…” _

Everyone conscious in the plane stopped their conversations to finish the lyric:  _ “Out of you!” _

Ned’s excited drumbeat on his knees ceased as he broke into roaring laughter. Peter joined him, giggling, and even MJ cracked a smile. Tony let his head drop against the back of his seat, breathing hard, and closed his eyes.

This was fun. More than that, it was comfortable,  _ inspiring.  _ With the confidence given by the presence of these friends, this family, he thought he might actually be able to pull this off. 

There were notecards in his hands, little milky strips that Tony was ignoring. They were bullet points, half formed reminders of things that needed discussing and ways to breech subjects, like he and Pepper would put together for any other meeting. He never followed them.

He thought he might, just this once. 

Introductions first, he supposed. Then explanations. It would be four Rogues sitting before the entirety of his team, fully initiated or not. Honestly, Tony was banking on the teenagers being so disorienting that he could just slip in, explain, and return to spaceship-building. 

Theoretically, they wouldn’t be returning home for much. Theoretically, this was their last stop before the universe opened wide. Just thinking about it made Tony’s stomach crawl up his throat, with equal parts excitement and fear. 

It wasn’t the mind-bending symbol it should have been, though, as their acceleration slowed to take them toward the dome of Wakanda. Though he’d arranged for the transport of the Gem and the Mind Stone, Tony didn’t have years worth of supplies tucked up beneath the plane. He hadn’t tucked up the functional prototype of the Mark 50 into his suitcase to take on a spaceship. He hadn’t declared his disappearance, nor spoken to the UN, nor committed to not returning to New York before takeoff.

Because he didn’t have to. They could base in Wakanda, officially or not, and no one would be the wiser.

Strange was meeting them in the city. Still injured, he hadn’t made himself visible much, though Tony had received a single line of text the day before.

_ ‘Meet you in the city. Don’t worry about packing.’ _

Tony had taken the intended message; an offer to be there should the need for instant travel become necessary. It seemed that maybe Strange had taken his words to heart, that he might try.

Perhaps the wizard would feel like an ally in the coming conversation with the Rogues. Perhaps.

But Tony did know he wouldn’t feel like an enemy.

“Are we there yet?” Peter wondered, both hands pressed to the glass of his window. Tony jerked out of his thoughts.

“What? Oh.” He tapped twice on his watch, pulling up a holographic map of their location. “Yeah, getting there. Everyone ready for this epic entrance?”

The entire plane stood up as one, Rhodey kicking Happy awake. They flowed into the auto-piloted cockpit to gaze through the front window as the quinjet dipped lower, heading directly toward the solid edge of a mountain. The rocks shone in the light. The spindly trees reached green fingers toward the African sun. Wind even whipped at their branches.

It was a pretty good illusion.

Tony let himself smile when they broke through the gap of the dome and the mountain fuzzed away into sparkling hexagons of light. A gasp whipped through the plane, a murmur of awe, and there was Wakanda spread out before them like a slumbering dragon in the golden heart of the world. It glittered, a fallen star come to burn in the Earth, and climbed higher and higher into the protected wonder of the deep blue sky. 

Beautiful. Absolutely beautiful, in objective aesthetic and understood history. Part of Tony, most of him, wanted to know it at every level possible.

He found himself leaning down into the shoulder of Michelle Jones, the quinjet whipping toward the palace. 

“Welcome to your new home,” he murmured.

The joy that radiated from her smile was enough to make Tony laugh with genuine understanding. 

“It’s so… it’s so  _ golden,”  _ Rhodey said, leaning in familiar movement across the control panel. “Wow.  _ Wow.” _

“This is the most beautiful place I’ve ever seen.” May spoke with a finality that none of them challenged. They lapsed into silence, drinking in everything the city spoke of as they descended toward the landing pad of the palace. 

They got there too soon. The sound of landing gear thunking into security against cool, smooth stone and concrete jerked Tony and the rest of his crew into action. Trotting back into the body of the quinjet, each gathered their belongings to wait to get off. 

“Welcome to Wakanda,” Shuri said with emphasis as they exited, dropping into a dramatic bow, “first academic exchangers to set foot in our world.”

Michelle’s usually confident response was nowhere to be found, and Shuri laughed as the other girl’s wide eyes finally found hers. “By all the gods, this place is  _ fantastic!” _

They high-fived without even looking, and Tony wondered if there’d even be a world to save by the time the semester was over, or if these two women would have taken over it by then. 

His attention was quickly stolen, however, by the slinking movement of Loki as he padded to linger at T’Challa’s feet. Something in the warrior-king’s eyes went instantly soft, and he reached down to pick the cat up.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Peter warned.

T’Challa froze. “Oh?”

“Loki, please stop messing with our hoasts,” Peter sighed.

“But it is infinitely enjoyable,” the cat grumbled. Tony choked in a laugh as T’Challa practically flew away from him. 

“Is the wizard here yet?” Rhodey asked, moving up next to Tony.

“Dunno.” 

He made his way toward Shuri, but didn’t reach her before the herd of individuals had migrated inside the palace. The sunlit warmth of the Southern Hemisphere was already unnerving him. Inside the building, the climate seemed reflected, twisting up the walls in curling patterns and shifting nanotech.

Peter reached out to touch one of the glittering panels. The wonder on his face kept Tony’s smile soft and genuine, even as they descended into the bowels of the palace, toward Shuri’s workshop, toward what was awaiting them. The notecards crinkled in his pocket.

Vision fell into step beside him, and Tony watched the way the arc-reactor in his forehead pulsed, so alike his Stone, yet so different. They’d brought the Gem with them, for explanatory purposes, and the Mind Stone was still locked in Shuri’s high-tech containment in this very city. Tony wondered if Vision could feel its proximity. He wondered if the android still felt tied to it, if he ever missed it.

They stopped outside the lab, a whisper of a pause as Shuri let them catch their figurative breath. 

“Are you ready?” she asked. The words were for all of them, but the question was for Tony.

He nodded. It was all of them or no one, everything or nothing. The kids, the friends, the kings and the princesses—each knew already. Each slotted into their plan, and each was ready to fight for it. Why not let them fight for him.

The door of the lab swung open under Shuri’s fingertips, and a stream of people, of warriors, spread in ranks into the stunning room. Tony squared his shoulders, stepping out through them. 

He had a Captain to confront.

* * *

Stephen wore his sling-ring on his right hand. His other moved freely, uninhibited by his half-healed injury, and let him protal with the same effectiveness. But the feeling of cold brass on the wrong hand was still unnerving.

The portal was perfect, round and sparking in symmetry, and maybe it was pride that had done it. Maybe it was vanity that had him flaring the Cloak slightly and holding his chin high as he stepped through. But damn if he didn’t look cinematically dramatic when he emerged into the lab in Wakanda. 

Cinematically dramatic to the wrong group of individuals.

Stephen was used, at this point, to being attacked when he made his appearances. So it was with half a wave that he stopped the bullet from finding its mark, a haze of sepia magic like a mirage in the air around him. The act was instinctual. He hadn’t expected to be shot at.

 But he also hadn’t expected to be greeted by Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers, Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, and James Barnes.

“Oh,” he said as the bullet dropped to the ground, meeting the eyes of a Russian assassin over the barrel of the weapon. “I was not warned of this.”

“Who are you?” was the quick order from one Captain Rogers.

Stephen pivoted, snapping his portal shut and edging up the sensitivity of his aura. Just in case anyone tried to do anything stupid. Like attack him again.

“Doctor Stephen Strange,” Stephen said. “Sorcerer.”

Behind Rogers, Maximoff’s head cocked in interest. Stephen blinked at her.

“Before you ask,” he continued, “I was invited. I’m meeting one Tony Stark, as I infer you are as well.”

A pause. A decidedly awkward one. Stephen rolled his eyes; he hadn’t signed up for the breakup angst, and he certainly didn’t want to watch it hash out.

But he was making an effort. It was the least he could do—at least, that’s what he decided to think as he edged out of the semicircle of heroes to reach the edge of the room and tried not to cough during the continued quiet that had fallen across them. 

Thankfully, Stark and the others arrived not a minute later. It was as dramatic as Stephen’s entrance had been, a full-on  _ advance  _ of Stark’s extended team, with the man himself in the center of it all. There was a black cat at his feet, and a shining determination in his eyes that didn’t flicker as they found Barnes with immediate precision.

Stephen thought he could hear his heart beating in the following silence. He thought he could see every one of Tony Stark’s restraints crumble. He watched as the genius built them back up again, one after the other, in a single blink. 

Barnes could not keep his gaze. Stephen watched it shift, ever so slightly, away from the other man’s face. 

Perhaps this would be interesting after all.

The first words were by the Captain. “I thought you’d be back in three days,” he said.

Stark didn’t miss a beat. “I lied.”

Another pause, heavy with pointed meaning.

Then, with a rustle, Stark’s determination softened, diluted, dissimulated into something clean, confident, and completely fake. Stephen recognized the expression. 

“So, then,” the billionaire began. “I think introductions are in order.”

“Please,” Stephen said, and the eyes of the newcomers turned to him for the first time.

“Oh good, the warlock’s here.” Stark smirked at him. “How’s the shoulder?”

“Better,” Stephen replied truthfully. He knew precisely what point Stark was making to the room around him, and let himself play along. “The flight?”

“Long. If you don’t know him—” Stark turned back to the room— “this is one of our magicians. Doctor Strange. That’s his actual name, so don’t get it confused.”

At that, Stark sent a pointed glance at Peter. The boy didn’t notice, his gaze to busy roving in conflicted circles across each of the Rogues’ faces. It seemed to remind Stark of his situation. 

“Yes. Strange. You all know me, and Pepper, and Rhodey, and Happy.”

“Are we supposed to say ‘hi’ or something?” Rhodey scoffed, though his voice was tight. Everything about this was tight and sharp, as if one wrong move could slice them all open.

“Hi,” Romanoff offered. 

Pepper nodded in her direction. Stephen didn’t know the woman well enough to distinguish how genuine it was. 

“The teenagers will remain nameless, unless they want to introduce themselves,” Stark continued, gesturing at Peter-and-crew. “And Vision?”

The question was directed to the android himself, whom Stephen hadn’t really observed until that moment. “Yes?” Vision asked, fidgeting slightly.

Stark smiled. “Get on with it.”

Like flipping on a switch, the android was moving, a streak of purplish color against the dark edges of the lab. Stephen never heard his feet touch the ground. Crimson and grinning, Maximoff moved too.

There was a note of breathless laughter, uncontained and unbidden, from one of them as they connected in the center of the lab. Vision wrapped long arms around Maximoff’s waist and lifted her into the air, spinning them both around as though they were the only inhabitants of the room, the only inhabitants of the multiverse. Her head buried in the crook of his neck, Maximoff smiled in the way of someone trying futility to control it.

Suddenly, a lot of things made sense to Stephen. 

“I missed you,” Maximoff said. The words were quiet, but in the hanging silence, even Stephen’s still-healing ears could pick them up.

“I missed you too.”

“Nice reactor.”

Stepping away, Vision tapped the light in his forehead. “It is.”

In the back, on Stark’s side of the room, someone applauded. Stephen was pretty sure it was Peter’s aunt.

Maximoff blushed, and Vision likely would have as well, given the anatomical capability. As it was, he simply shuffled backward, edging into line again. Maximoff went to trail him, but seeing Rhodes and Stark beside him, and she hesitated. Caught in the gap between two groups, her gaze slid to Stephen.

_ Can’t help you in the family drama here,  _ Stephen thought.  _ Sorry. _

“Anyone else?” Stark asked, gesturing to the groups around him.

No one moved. Stephen heard his heartbeat again. 

“Alright then.” Stark moved forward, slipping over to one of the tables and lowering himself into a spinning chair. He rotated in it twice. “Let’s get to it, shall we?”

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that went slightly better? 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	93. Glances Amongst Themselves

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Too long it has been TOO LONG since I've written in Loki's POV... enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

Loki was unashamed to reap the benefits of being a cat.

For one, he was out of view. No one really took note of him, not in the haze of people and confusion and tension that had burst around them, which meant that he avoided his introduction. Stark had enough to worry about without including his history and position. 

For another thing, he had the ability to purr. Midgardians seemed to have an instinctual reaction to the noise, smiling or relaxing in the smallest ways. So Loki went to work, curling about Stark’s ankles and rumbling reassuringly.

As a cat, Loki also got out of being part of the explanation. Their usual formation (Loki for the Stone, Peter for the list, and Stark for the merge) had been upended already by the presence of the sorcerer. By virtue of existence, Strange warped their usual repartee, shaping the discussion so Stark spoke of the mission and the wizard described the mechanics.

And it went well. It went more than well, it went  _ smoothly.  _ In the moments that Strange spoke, impartial and technical, Loki felt Stark breathe. When the engineer then continued his description, it was organized and efficient as a general to a soldier. 

“We have a game plan,” Stark was saying. He wasn’t really looking at any of them, though he’d met Strange’s eyes a few times. “First to Asgard, then onward. We have a ship, at least in the makings, and a warp core already built. All we need is a team.”

There was silence after his words as a few cautious looks were thrown about the room. Leeds edged closer to Peter, who had moved to stand behind Stark. Shuri and MJ had separated themselves with T’Challa, while Rhodes planted himself unapologetically next to Stark. Inside the lab, five individuals—familiar and foreign to Loki—swirled almost defensively around a one-armed man. 

“A team,” Wilson said with rueful amusement. 

“Yup.” Stark shrugged. “You’re on my list.”

“My list,” Strange clarified from the corner.

“You want us… all on a spaceship. In a single space, for who-knows-how long.” Romanoff was raising an eyebrow, her eyes twitching across each of them as she sorted and strategized.

“God no,” Stark huffed. “I want some of us on a spaceship.”

“Some of us will have to stay,” Peter contributed. “Protecting Earth from Thanos and stuff. Or other threats.”

“Sorry, who are you?” The Wilson-man asked.

“Oh, uh, I’m…” Peter glanced at Stark, who nodded.

“Up to you, kid.”

“You know me,” Peter said to the assembled Rogues. “I’m Spider-Man.”

A collective intake of breath.  _ “You’re  _ Spider-Man?” Rogers almost barked.

Loki could see Peter struggling to find his reaction. In the end, it was all too akin to Stark’s. “At your service,” Peter said, bowing.

“But—you’re—” Rogers swiveled to look at Stark.  _ “He’s a kid.” _

“Didn’t notice in the airport?”

“I did, but he’s  _ a child.  _ What—”

“If you’re about to finish that sentence the way I think you are,” Happy interrupted, “I would advise you to  _ not.” _

Just like that, the tension in the room had skyrocketed again. Loki could feel it lifting the fur on his spine. Rogers was peering at Peter, at Stark, and Loki flicked his tail, increasing the volume of his purr. 

Aggressively, obviously, Stark redirected the conversation. “I’ll be on the ship. Obviously.”

“So will I,” Strange said from across the room. “Unfortunately.”

Stark looked down at Loki where he was pacing around their feet. He raised his eyebrows, as Loki met his gaze, and the cat sighed and lowered himself onto his haunches. “And me.”

Everyone on the opposite side of the room, including Strange, froze.

“Oh yes, hello,” Loki said, waving a paw. 

“The—the cat,” Maximoff observed.

“What, did you assume we simply brought forth some random creature to accompany us here?” Loki scoffed. “I am integral to this quest.”

Stark, rolling his eyes, kicked at Loki to move him out of the way. Loki hissed. “Yes,” Stark sighed, “meet the champion of the Stalk. More commonly referred to as—”

Loki, unable to resist the dramatic moment, took that second to shift, manifesting the entirety of his Asgardian robes and including his knives for good measure.

“—Loki of Asgard.”

In half a second, the room had gone from two quiet to utterly chaotic. Just how Loki liked it. Maximoff’s hands were wreathed in a powerful crimson aura, and a firearm had materialized in Romanoff’s fist. Rogers’ enormous hands curled into fists. Wilson’s hands flew to his belt, but the man in the center, nameless to Loki, simply cocked his head.

“Do we know him?” the man wondered. Speaking for the first time, his voice was low and slightly tired.

“Yes,” Rogers replied shortly. “We do.”

“He tried to kill us,” Peter provided helpfully. “But this version of him is from the future and he’s come to help, so it’s all good.”

Someone scoffed. “‘It’s all good?’ Kid, that’s a  _ mass murderer.” _

Loki did  _ not  _ flinch. The title didn’t strike so deeply, not with Peter’s reassurance flooding to the forefront of his mind. 

“Yeah, and?” Peter crossed his arms. “He’s also a powerful sorcerer who’s risked his life and his happiness to try and help us. He’s fought and almost died for me.”

“I come in peace,” Loki added. He shot Peter a grin, which the boy returned.

“We—” He didn’t get to finish the sentence. 

“Is that what you told Clint? What you told Coulson?” 

Romanoff’s voice was icy cold. It sliced through the clamor, leaving them all in suspended quiet. It was too calm, too nonthreatening, which gave it a power and an intimidation all its own. For a moment, Loki thought he might have gone too far.

“Neither of them are here now, for wildly different reasons,” Romanoff purred, “but I’m not sure I’d count that lucky just yet.”

Loki’s grip on his knives tightened.

And too his surprise, Strange stepped forward. “Don’t,” the other sorcerer said. 

All eyes turned to him. Strange tucked his hands behind the folds of his Cloak and continued, “the Scepter was used two ways in that New York battle.”

Loki stiffened. “How did you know that.”

As though there was no one else in the room, Strange shrugged. “It wasn’t that hard to see, once I familiarized myself with the power of the Mind Stone. Sorry, Stark, I may have accessed a few of your databases.”

“Damn you, FRI,” Stark muttered.

“But yes. The influence of the Mind Stone was forced onto your allies,” Strange gestured to the Avengers, “and it was also forced onto Loki.”

“But…” Rogers shook his head. “Was it?”

Loki closed his eyes. “It was.”

He left it at that. The whole explanation was too long, too arduous; he didn’t want to tell it, and these people didn’t want to hear it.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Strange continued. “Out of everyone, you were the individual picked to return, picked to wield an Infinity Stone and our only guide home. We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for you, so it’s basic logic that we keep you alive.”

“Appreciation,” Loki said hesitantly. “I think.”

“You’re welcome.” Strange smirked, and  _ ah yes,  _ that was why Loki wanted to stab him. 

“So, what,” Wilson demanded, “we’re supposed to just up and  _ follow  _ this…” he waved expansively at Loki, “ _ enemy?”  _

“Nope,” Stark said, popping the  _ p,  _ “you’re supposed to follow me. And I say he’s coming. Any questions? No, good.” The words were quick, even quicker than their sarcasm should justify, and Loki saw the genius was still blinking away from the one-armed man. 

“So that’s three on the spaceship, so far.” Potts redirected the conversation. 

Peter opened his mouth to add his voice, but Stark continued before he could. “Everything else is pretty much up for debate. Shuri, how much room did we end up with?”

Peter frowned.

Shuri stepped forward, her hands waving. Almost like Strange’s magic, the center of the lab burst to life, a spinning hologram building itself before them. “I was able to work in a bit more quarterly space after you left,” she said to Stark. “So we can support six for long periods of time.”

“Six,” Tony said with a nod. “That’s better than I expected.”

“Anyway, so that’s three open spots,” Shuri sighed. “Let the hunger-games begin.” 

“Two,” Peter said.

Everyone turned to him, and Loki gave a nod. Of course.

“What?” Maximoff inquired.

“Two spaces. I’m coming.”

Beside Loki, Stark closed his eyes.

May stepped toward the boy, her footsteps echoing. Peter almost flinched when he saw her; Loki could see it in the set of his shoulders. 

_ Oh,  _ the Asgardian thought.  _ Right.  _

“Peter,” his aunt began.

But Peter only shook his head. “I’m going. I am.”

“Let’s—” Stark swallowed. “I’ll talk to you later, okay kid?” 

The question didn’t leave room for debate. Peter opened his mouth, perhaps to protest, but Stark simply looked at him, and the boy conceded with a nod. Turing back to the Rogues, the engineer said, “anyway.”

“Anyway,” Romanoff replied somewhat detachedly. She was still watching Loki. 

“We need people here.” Stark clasped his fingers. “On Earth, I mean. We can’t know what will happen, and we can’t risk Thanos deviating from our expectations.”

“Eggs, basket,” Shuri said, miming scooping something with her hands.

“Right. Who thinks they should join us off-Earth, then?”

Everyone in the room raised their hands. 

Well, most everyone. Vision did not move, and neither did T’Challa. Stark raised his eyebrows, taking in the room full of volunteers, with and without powers and abilities. 

“That’s, again, better than I expected,” Stark admitted. 

“Are you kidding?” Wilson said with a grin. “We’re bored off our asses over here.”

As if surprised by the amiability, Stark cocked his head at the man. His response still felt fast and easy to Loki, however. Precisely as intended. “Well, unless some of you want to share oxygen for a year, we’re gonna have to narrow it down.”

“You need power, unpredictability,” Wilson persisted. “I’ll go. Pretty sure I can stand a year in close proximity, anyway.”

Stark rolled his eyes. “I’m flattered.”

“It’s space,” Strange piped up. “Isn’t your suit for dynamic movement and wide maneuverability? Flight?”

“Yes, your point?” Wilson looked at the sorcerer.

“Not much use in closed quarters.” Strange shrugged. “Just saying.”

“Stark is a flight-based power, as well.”

“Yes, but Stark is also the genius engineer who designed, understands, and will be piloting our vessel.” Strange’s smirk widened.

“Point,” Romanoff conceded. 

“Okay, okay,” Stark raised his hands. “I think this might be better if we start with who stays.”

“Alright,” T’Challa said. “As much as I would like to join you, I must remain on Earth. I am a king, and I will not abandon my people if I do not have to.”

“Good, makes sense.” Stark pointed at him, then moved the finger to indicate Shuri, MJ, and Leeds. “You three?”

“Should probably stay,” Shuri sighed. 

“Though kicking alien ass would be amazing,” MJ added.

“Indeed.” Ned rubbed his hands together. “But we can stay here. Ground control, communications base. All that.”

Stark’s finger pointed to May and Pepper and Happy, who all reluctantly raised their own in surrender. “Fine, yes,” Happy said. “We’ll stay.”

The finger indicated Vision. The android shrugged, tapping the arc-reactor in his forehead. “Without the Stone, I am no more than an overly strong, resilient robot,” he said. “Not to be self-deprecating; I am fully comfortable with this. I simply mean that there are other overly strong, resilient individuals who could take my place and offer more insight.”

“Okay, then,” Stark allowed. “I’ll miss you.”

Loki found himself speaking before he could think. “And I. Your… friendship will be a great loss.”

Vision smiled. “It won’t be lost.”

Maximoff’s brow furrowed. “You… know Loki?” she asked Vision.

“Yes. He is a very good cook.”

The confusion that followed that statement rippled through everyone in the room. Peter snickered into his hand.

“That leaves us, then,” Rogers said. 

“And me.” Rhodes stepped forward slightly, looking Stark in the eye. Loki could see the conversation there, the promise. He didn’t know what it was, couldn’t read it, but there was a connection he was familiar with that stretched for a moment between the two men. 

“I don’t want to mention this,” Rhodes sighed, “not in any way. But I don’t think—legally—that it’s a good idea for me to leave Earth.”

Stark blinked. 

“Explain,” Loki demanded. He liked the colonel; his presence would have been appreciated.

Rhodes obliged. “T’Challa is the only legal hero that remains known on Earth. And he’s not part of the Avengers. We can’t send all of us to space, not without—in the eyes of 117 countries—deserting the world.”

The number made just about everyone in the room go stiff. Loki looked around, knowing he was missing something, but unable to identify it.

“Rhodey,” Stark began.

“Sorry, Tones,” the colonel sighed. “I’ll speak to them. You just focus on saving the world, okay?”

“I…okay. Okay, okay…”

Rhodes’ hands found the billionaire’s shoulder, and he offered him a smile. “I know, terribly difficult without me. But you’ve done it before.”

“Multiple times,” Stark agreed with too much levity. The hand on his shoulder squeezed.

Loki was definitely missing something.

Someone, picking up just as keenly on the awkwardness, coughed. Someone else cleared their throat. It was a couple of heartbeats, though, before Stark sighed and looked away from his friend. He blinked at the assembled crowd. 

“That leaves you all, then. As Shuri said…” He made an expansive hand gesture that resembled a chopping motion mixed with an invitation. Loki filed it away for later use.

Five Rogues sent glances amongst themselves, spiraling closer together as if drawn by magnetic force. Behind them, Strange had gone still. Only his eyes followed the scene around him. It was impressive; Loki had almost forgotten his presence. 

Eventually, after a few minutes of tense silence, Rogers shook himself and asked, “could we maybe… have some time to decide?”

Stark shrugged. “Of course. You have until takeoff to make your decision.”

“He’s exaggerating. You have until… like two days before takeoff. Though we won’t be customizing any space in the ship for you, if so,” Shuri clarified.

Peter turned to her. “We’re customizing parts of the ship?”

“Well, sure.” Shuri shrugged, ignoring the tense atmosphere. She acted almost in spite of it, actually, and Loki had half a mind to nod. Shuri continued, “if there’s something obvious that would make a crew member more comfortable, then why not?”

“Do we have exercise and sparring spaces?” Strange asked from the back. “We can’t afford to lose our edge, as we fly almost directly toward battle.”

Stark scoffed. “What do you take me for, an amateur? Of course we do.”

“Artificial gravity, as well,” Shuri provided.

Strange blinked. “Oh? How did you manage that?”

“Some siphoned power from your engine and a transmitter that reprograms it as a magnetic field, almost. But for matter.”

“Impressive.”

“Thanks, I thought so.” Shuri grinned. “Anyway, yeah. The ship will be ready when you make your decision.”

Her words faded out, and no one moved. There was some awkward shuffling, and Shuri rolled her eyes. She muttered something under her breath. Then, with a wave of her arms and an exaggeratedly slow voice, she proclaimed, “and if there are no more questions, let today’s seminar be dismissed. I want you out of my lab.”

The speed at which the room emptied proved that light speed travel didn’t have to bend spacetime with a warp core. Pointing Shuri’s dismissal at a crowd of people who were practically burning up in awkward atmosphere did just as well. Loki ended up back in the hallway they’d entered through. Peter and the others were with him, while the Rogues had exited somewhere else, thankfully. Even Stark and Strange left when Shuri indicated, weaving to stand at the front of Loki’s group, next to T’Challa.

The king appraised them all with a quick eye, then beckoned. “Come,” he said. “If you have no more business here, I will show you to your quarters for the time until you leave.”  
Loki moved to stand next to Peter, cocking his head questioningly. So close to others, he dismissed his knife. He offered his empty palm to his brother in arms.

“Staying?” he assumed.

Peter nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got…” a glance toward Stark— “more business here.”

“Would you like me to remain here?” Loki inquired. Peter bit his lower lip, but shook his head. 

“No. It’s… it’ll be fine.”

“It will.” Loki squeezed the boy’s shoulder, then stepped away toward the group of people trailing after T’Challa. “Call me when you win.”

Peter huffed a laugh. “I keep forgetting you have a phone…”

“A most helpful object, though it could be improved by an edition of sharp corners.”

Rolling his eyes, Peter shoved Loki up the hall, a laugh on his lips. “I’m not letting you tape a knife to your phone case, Loki. Not happening.”

“Fine. But—”

“I can’t hear you!” Peter was grinning, though, and it lifted the weight of the uncomfortable conversation he’d just been partial to off Loki’s chest a little. He shouldn’t care so much; the little spat between these individuals had nothing to do with him. It had hardly anything to do with Peter, either. 

And yet… 

And yet he’d still purred, still listened, still  _ felt  _ the hostility and apprehension of that room and those words. And yet he was still relieved to be free of it, to put off the next round of decision making for another time. And yet he still cared.

He needed to stab someone. To make up for it. 

“Good luck,” Loki sighed, patting Peter’s wrist.

Then he turned and skated after T’Challa, ready to find his routine for the days to follow. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tune in next time for Discussion. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	94. Involve Himself

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *crashes through window with a trombone* *screeches something unholy into it* *(because I don't play the trombone)* *slams chapter onto desk* *dives back outside*

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

Contrary to popular belief, it seemed, Peter had thought this through.

He’d thought this through a lot. Though there hadn’t been any real question—not to him—he refused to shy away from the issues. And there were a vast number of issues.

Issues in his footsteps when he closed the door to his bedroom. Issues on his lock screen of his phone; Ned’s grin beneath the blocky numbers of the time and date. Issues that twisted in his chest when MJ appraised him, laughed with him,  _ looked  _ at him. Issues in the feathering of Tony’s jaw when the subject was breached.

Issues written all over May’s face.

_ Issues. _

Each and every one of the little, prickling doubts were worming up Peter’s spine as he sat, hands clasped against his knees, in the cylindrical corridor outside Shuri’s lab. They felt like centipedes, a thousand little legs prickling against his vertebrae. Peter pressed himself against the back of the little built-in bench. Swallowing was difficult, and there was a stinging at his sinuses, and Peter didn’t know why—he’d already made his decision.

And yet, he was still afraid. Not of leaving, though.

“Hey kid.”

Peter looked up, swallowing futilely at the lump in his throat as all of those  _ issues  _ sat down next to him with a heavy sigh. Tony looked tired—already so worn from the worlds and the conversations he had breached that day.

But Peter had to make him understand. He  _ had  _ to.

“I’m coming with you,” he started. “I have to.”

“You don’t.”

Peter wrung his hands, shaking his head over and over. “I do. You know I have to—I’m not staying here.”

“You could, Pete. You could stay, live a life, protect the people down here,  _ build a future  _ to last into the merged dimension.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?” Tony sounded like he already knew the answer.  
“Because I might live down here,” Peter said, choosing his words ever-so-carefully, “but I can _help_ up there. I’m enhanced, Mr. Stark; I’m strong, I’m quick, I’m sticky. You might be able to do without me up there, but I won’t be a hindrance. And it’s my responsibility to be up there, using what I can do for the greatest good I can manage.”

He looked at Tony, eyes wide, just barely keeping the  _ ‘please, don’t you see?’  _ from his lips. But the man seemed to see it, all the same. His eyes shuttering with something deep and cold, Tony put a hand on Peter’s shoulder.

“Your responsibility has nothing to do with this,” he said.

“It has everything to do with this!”

_ “No.  _ Peter, you’re a  _ kid.  _ Don’t bite my head off; it’s the objective truth. There’s nothing keeping you from staying,  _ no reason  _ why you—why you should risk your life and future on something like this.”

Something dark bloomed in Peter’s chest at the words. “And there is for you?”

“I… no, there isn’t, not the same way. But this…” Tony looked as though he was searching for words, something to describe the pull to sacrifice, to fight.

Peter knew the words he sought. “Is who you are?” he provided. “Is everything you want to be, everything you expect for yourself? Is what fate has gifted to you? Is what your skills push you toward? Is what  _ you can’t live without?” _

Tony didn’t answer.

“It’s like that for me too, Mr. Stark. So what that I’m young? It feels just as twisting, just as demanding, just as  _ exhilarating.”  _

“Yes, but it’s a choice.” Tony gesticulated almost frantically, and Peter could feel the displaced air on his cheeks. 

“So I don’t get to choose that?” Peter demanded. “I don’t get to—”

“This isn’t a field trip! It’s not an exchange, a vacation; this is a one-way ticket. There’s no coming back, and there’s no  _ going  _ back.”

Peter took a deep breath. “I know,” he said. “I  _ know _ .”

He was leaving everything he knew behind. He was venturing into a world, into a universe, that no more cared for him as he understood it. Untold dangers awaited his innocent, naive impression of them, untold mistakes, untold frustrations. This quest was something that could kill him. This quest was something that could change him. That  _ would  _ change him.

Once he’d touched the stars, Peter could never really belong on the ground again. 

Maybe sometimes, underneath everything, he dreamed of being normal. Maybe it was more often than he wanted to admit. Maybe the thought of waking up in the sun, of looking forward to an afternoon with friends, of bitching about school and parents, of falling in love, was something that Peter wanted so badly it hurt. Tony was right; he was a kid.

But he was also a hero. He had been gifted by fate with powers beyond his form. Strength and speed, adhesion and agility, Peter’s human body hadn’t know what to do with itself. 

His mind did. His mind always had. 

Peter knew, with as much certainty as he knew his own name, that he was meant to fight. That as long as there was a world to save, as long as Tony Stark reached for a better one, it would be Peter’s role to  _ protect  _ it. To use his gifts and his ambitions to save what could be saved, and to give everything he could even when it couldn’t be. 

Because failing was one thing. But losing when you hadn’t even tried? That was so much worse. 

So Peter would be on that spaceship. He would be on that spaceship, would die there, if that’s what this took. He was Spider-Man, and _ he would fight. _

“I choose this, Mr. Stark,” Peter said. “I chose it a long time ago. And I’m not scared. I don’t regret it. Maybe we’ll fail, and maybe we’ll loose, and maybe we’ll die, but that doesn’t matter, does it?”

“It matters to me,” Tony said with such breathless certainty that Peter’s words were stolen off his tongue. “Your life matters to me, kid. Your existence, yes, but your future too.”

“I could say the same!” Peter let the back of his head thunk against the side of the corridor. “Can you imagine staying here? Watching the rest of us fly away?”

“I want to know you’re safe.”

_ “So do I!” _ The words were harsh, directed not toward Tony, but toward the situation around them. “You want me to—to just  _ stay?  _ To wave goodbye when you might—when you might not come back?” The thought was paralyzing. “What future is there for me if I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again?”

“Peter.”

“It goes both ways, Mr. Stark,” Peter insisted. “I want to see you safe. I want to see Loki safe. I want to see you with something to look forward to in life. You can’t go without me on a mission I have to help with, and you can’t go without me to a place  _ I can’t protect you.” _

Peter was breathing hard, chin lifted and shoulders rolled back as he resolutely looked Tony in the eye. He wasn’t sure when he’d met the man’s gaze, wasn’t even sure when he’d turned on the bench. But he had to make Tony understand. He had to make him see.

And Tony did. Peter saw it, saw the realization flicker behind those intense irises. The relief that flooded him at Tony’s subtle, quiet nod had Peter slumping against the wall, letting out a long breath.

“Sorry,” he said.

Tony huffed, a sardonic grin cracking across his face. “What am I supposed to do with you, kid?”

“Nothing. I do what I want.” Peter grinned. 

“Oh, hell will be the day. You’ve been spending too much time with Loki.” 

“He’s fun!”

“I’m fun! You could be orchestrating unholy shenanigans with me at least in the loop.”

Peter raised his hands. “But then who would we test them on?”

“Uh, Rhodey, obviously. He’s used to it; would give you far more accurate data than I ever could.”

“But as you said! You’re so much more fun!” Peter shrugged, glancing at Tony out of the corner of his eye.

“Don’t twist my words back at me, young man. You know what I meant.”

“Yeah, but you  _ said—” _

“Letter of the law, kid. That’s the second rule of Being the Boss.”

“Uh-huh.” 

“Is that sarcasm I sense?”

Peter quickly schooled his face into innocence. “You mean the third rule?”

“No, sarcasm is the fifth rule. Slots three and four are filled by ‘having a fantastic pair of sunglasses’ and ‘keeping people from noticing how short you are.’”

Peter snorted. “But what if you’re tall?”

Raising an eyebrow, Tony leaned against the back of the hall and crossed his arms. “Then you aren’t the boss. Obviously.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“You do that.” Stark stood, straightening his shirt and glancing at the entrance to the lab and then back down the hall. “So, do you want to talk to your aunt, or…”

“I’ll explain,” Peter said. He bounced up to standing beside Tony. She deserved to hear it from him—deserved him to look her in the eye as he explained. 

_ I love you. And I have to go. _

“Don’t envy you that.” Tony gave him a pat on the shoulder. “Short end of the stick. Anyway, I’ll help Shuri out with the build. See you.”

“Yeah, see ya,” Peter replied. He lingered for a moment, unwilling to start off down the hall, and so did Tony. They both watched each other awkwardly, before Tony looked away with a huff of laughter.

“Right. Bye.”

Forcing his feet to move, Peter trotted in the direction T’Challa and the others had embarked. He didn’t turn. Running a hand through his curls, Peter blew out a breath of equal parts relief and anticipation. 

“Kid?”

Peter paused.

“Promise me something, okay?”

“Yeah?”

“Promise me you won’t risk yourself. That when it comes down to it, it won’t ever be me over you.”

Peter froze. 

“Kid.”

“You want me to swear that… what? That I won’t choose your life over mine?”  
Tony was silent, and that was all the answer Peter needed. 

Peter left the hall without replying, his footsteps echoing as Tony turned back to the lab. But his answer hung in the empty air, as bright and clear as vibranium. 

_ I don’t make promises I can’t keep. _

* * *

The first thing Stephen had learned upon realizing the limitations of his sling-ring was that you wanted to see as much of your surroundings as possible. There were moments when just “outside” wasn’t enough, when one room to the next was a matter of life and death. He liked his options to be as diverse and precise as his surgery tools had been. The control, the knowledge that he could rely on himself to get anywhere, anytime, was comforting.

Which was how Stephen came to be wandering through the hallways of Wakanda’s palace, taking note of everything that caught his eye. That part was more for fun. He didn’t truly need to memorize the elegant swoops of the arched halls and rooms, nor did he need to chart the maze of corridors down to a blueprint, but he might as well, while he was here. 

He’d just stepped inside a particularly thin hallway, deep in the depths of the mountain, when something creaked. A footstep, a whisper, and clink of metal; Stephen froze. The Cloak fluttered, coiling up closer to his neck and flaring at the edges. Stephen inched his hands apart, touching shaking forefinger to thumb and sidling to the silvery edge of the well-lit passage.

He caught a few words, but not enough to string meaning. The effort of listening, straining through the feeling of clogged swelling in his ears as the drums continued slowly healing, made his head ring.

However, the voices grew closer beneath the clicking echo of numerous footsteps. Stephen cocked his head, daring to shuffle a few steps toward the corner of the hall.

“I thought you said he was still mad at you,” a voice was saying. “I thought that went well.”

“You don’t know Tony, Buck. He was angry.” That was Rogers—Stephen’s interest piqued. 

“Well, still. The last time I saw him there was rather more violence.”

“Verbal violence, this time.” Romanoff sounded ruefully amused.

“Either way,” Wilson said, “at least he  _ finally  _ told us what was going on.”

“What do you make of it?” Maximoff’s wondering was accompanied by the shifting of footsteps as the group came to a stop. “The broken universe. The past and future?”

“What do we make of it? The question is, what do we make of you and the android?” Wilson’s voice was teasing. “How long’s that been happening?”

“A while.”

“After…”

“Yes.”

“Hm.”

"Vision knows what’s right, and he knows who he wants to be." Maximoff's voice was slightly defensive.

“And you love him?” Rogers asked, no judgement in his tone.

“I do.”

“Good.” There was a smile in the Captain’s voice. “I’m glad you found that connection.”

“Yeah, it feels good.” Maximoff sighed, sounding content, then repeated, “but really. What do you think of this whole situation?” 

“I think we should have known long before. I think we should be in that lab, right now, scouring every bit of information we have and flushing out every  _ inkling  _ of a plan.”

“Yeah, Steve, but you believe it? Just like that?” Barnes’s voice.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s batshit crazy, for one,” Romanoff laughed. “And yet, we’ve seen crazier.”

“Suppose we have,” Wilson agreed. “Still. Dimensions and souls? Dreams and time travel? Sentient clothing?”

On Stephen’s back, the Cloak perked up. Stephen patted it, rolling his eyes, and whispered, “yes, they’re talking about you. Hush.”

“As opposed to robots and aliens and dystopian futures. It’s all relative on the scale of batshit.” 

“It’s high up there on the scale—it’s universal,” Rogers sighed. “This is the biggest threat we’ve ever faced.”

“No offense, Steve, but you say that every time,” Barnes pointed out.

A laugh. “Shut up, Buck.”

“Who’s going on the ship, then?”

That brought a silence through the hall, during which Stephen became aware that he was most definitely eavesdropping. He didn’t much care; this was the most interesting thing to happen all day, primarily because he didn’t have to involve himself. Edging closer, Stephen waited. 

“Only two open spaces? Probably not me,” Wilson said with a sigh. “That sorcerer—what was his name? Weird? Peculiar?”

Stephen rolled his eyes.

Wilson continued, “he was right about my strengths. I’d be better off here, defending if this Thanos turns his gaze to us.” 

“I…” Barnes began tentatively. “I don’t think…”

There seemed a collective inhale in the hallway, a pause that hung in the air as Barnes searched for his words. It was immediate and familiar, as though these people knew precisely what was comfortable, what was necessary for the man to feel safe. Something in the empathy of it had Stephen trying to redefine  _ ‘criminal’  _ in his mind. 

“I will go. If we think it’s best. But I… I’d have to get someone to take care of the goats, y’know?”

“Understood,” Rogers said almost instantly. The others voiced their agreement as well. 

“Those fucking goats,” Wilson grumbled.

“Hey, langu—”

“Do not start.”

Another chuckle, and the creak of the hall as someone moved back across it. “I like the goats. They don’t bitch, or put themselves in unnecessarily dangerous situations, or—”

“We get it, Bucky, you’re a shepherd now.” Romanoff’s voice was accompanied by a sarcastic round of single-woman applause. 

“And a damn good one, thank you.”

“I’d go,” Maximoff said, somewhat randomly.

“Huh?”

“On the ship. I’d go.”

“Me too,” Romanoff agreed.

“And me,” contributed Rogers.

“That’s one too many.”  
“Yeah, Sam, your arithmetic is blowing my mind.” There was an eyeroll in Barnes’ words. 

“Barnes—”

_ “Anyway,”  _ Rogers interrupted quickly, “that at least narrows it down. I do think—I think I should go. I don’t think I can do anything else.”

“Well yeah, obviously,” Barnes sighed. “Couldn’t keep you on Earth for any part of it.”

“Don’t you know it.”

“What about us then, Wanda?” Romanoff asked. “Think a year or more in space sounds like your cup of tea?”

“I’ve spent years in worse environments. Besides, I kick more ass than all of you combined.”

No one argued, and no one laughed either. Apparently, this was an established fact. 

“I know these people better,” Romanoff offered. “At least, I have more experience with them. Not that that seemed to make much difference; we’re reserving a spot for a kid and a complete stranger. Priorities.”

“I wonder if he’s like me,” Maximoff mused.

Stephen’s frown quirked further into confusion.

“Who?”

“The sorcerer.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” Maximoff continued. “It would be nice. If someone understood.”

“We do our best,” Rogers said. “But yes, I see that.” 

“I don’t like him,” Wilson volunteered.

“Yeah, Sam, we’ve noticed,” Romanoff chuckled. 

“I don’t! I have enough narcissistic assholes to deal with with Barnes here.”

“Which is why you, bird boy,” Barnes said sweetly, “will not be getting on the spaceship.”

“Yes,  _ getting back on topic,”  _ Rogers sighed, “I want to consider the reasons you each have to stay. It seemed to work rather well before… anything come to mind?”

A thoughtful quiet stretched for a long moment, before Romanoff said, “not much, Cap.” There was a shrug in her voice. “Same thing here as up there.”

“Except for our lovely faces,” Wilson purred. The sound of a quick scuffle followed.

Maximoff mused, “I mean, I… it would be nice not having to hide now. With Vision, I mean. He doesn’t have his powers anymore, beyond those of his makeup now that the Stone is gone, and he says he’s fine. But it’s still… it’s a big change.” She was quick to add, “but he would understand. And I  _ want  _ to go, I want to help. To do something right.”

“You would be doing right on Earth, that’s not… you shouldn’t worry, there.”

“You know it’s not the same.”  
Rogers sighed. “No, it’s not, but different doesn’t mean worse. You deserve time here.”

“So do you.”

“Yes, but I don’t want it.” The words were almost bitter, and Stephen blinked slowly. 

“I remember…” Romanoff spoke tightly, like she was concentrating hard. “This Earth just seems so  _ wrong _ . It only ever feels right in my dreams—I guess that makes sense, what with the merged universes and our splinter or whatever. Maybe not being on it, making memories untainted by anything else, would help that.”

“You want to go?” Maximoff wondered. 

“I do. The risk is, of course, a risk, but it’s always worth it. Besides, I miss…” she trailed off.

But the quiet that followed was agreement enough.

“Alright then, so it’s decided,” Rogers murmured. “I suppose we—”

He broke off, inhaling sharply, and Stephen supposed that was a direct result of the fact that the Cloak, patience lost and curiosity heightened, had drifted around the corner to poke at them experimentally. Stephen tried to retract his hand, desperately extended to pull it back, but it was too late. He managed to turn his scramble into a stride. Hopefully, his gait was quick and uninterrupted, as though he’d been passing through and not lingering to listen in. 

“Greetings,” he said. His fingers caught the Cloak’s hem, but the determined relic shook him off.  _ “Hey,”  _ he hissed, and was ignored.

The Cloak hovered in front of Rogers for a moment, who had edged into the middle of the hall to keep the others protected behind him. It poked at his beard. Then at his hair. Rogers didn’t move, but his brow furrowed every further.

“Sorry,” Stephen huffed, getting a better grip on the fabric this time. He wrapped it around both shaking fists and coaxed the Cloak away from the confused superheros. “The Cloak does what it wants.”

“It’s… floating,” someone observed. 

“Yes.”

“And also sentient?”

“Yes.” Stephen slipped into the Cloak and let it settle on his shoulders.

“Someone put me back on ice.”

“I’m sure that can be arranged, Barnes.”

“Can it, bird boy.”

Stephen raised his eyebrows at the group, then took a few steps back. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. At least, you haven’t.”

No one piped up. Stephen supposed that was understandable, especially considering the provocative comments he would likely be unable to contain once said introductions were given. “No? Fine then.”

“Who are you?”

Stephen’s eyebrow quirked higher. “Are you impaired in some way?”

He got an eye-roll in reward for that. “Not your name,” Rogers sighed, “your… purpose. Why are you here?”

“I’m regretfully expected to be part of the team.”

“Who’s team is that, then?” The double-layered words were part accusation, part wistfulness.

“Pretty sure Parker started it. Or maybe it was Loki. He had the Stone first… but I sent him. Oh, I like that.” Stephen smirked. “This is my team, actually.”

Silence. The heroes exchanged a few looks.

“Don’t overwork yourselves,” Stephen offered. “Just consider me the new recruit.”

“But with a fully practiced arsenal.” Romanoff crossed her arms, grinning a bit. Wilson shot her a confused look.

“He caught a bullet!” 

“Yes,” Maximoff added, “how did you do that?”

Stephen shrugged. “I saw the Widow raise her arm and acted on instinct.”

“Yes, but  _ how.” _

It was a curious question, and interested question—and also a defensive question, from an individual feeling ever-so-slightly threatened. Stephen tried not to show his satisfaction at that. 

“An aura automatically cultivated through my Mystical connection that interfere with the bullet’s kinetic energy,” was his answer.

There was a blink, and the Rogues dropped the subject. Smirking slightly, Stephen played with the edge of the Cloak and waited. He allowed them a chance before he dismissed himself.

But there were no further questions, and no further comments. Stephen nodded shortly, wrapped his fingers around his sling-ring, and pushed through the group to continue down the hall at the other side. They didn’t stop him.

The Winter Soldier met his eyes, just once, with the quiet interest of a wolf. Stephen held them. 

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well that was fun. For me at least. XD


	95. Willing to Kill For It

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, this chapter was HARD; heavy and complex and controversial and I hope I did it justice... I wanted to get it to you guys tonight though, so sorry I didn't end up responding to the comments on the last chapter! Thank you all so much--you know I appreciate it!
> 
> Anyway, enjoy!

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

The summer sun of this southern country drew Loki like a moth to the light, luring him up and out of the depths of the mountain and onto the balcony of the palace five and a half days after their arrival. Someone else, it seemed, had the same idea.

“Oh. Greetings,” Loki said as he stepped out across the terris to meet Colonel Rhodes.

“Hey, Loki,” the colonel sighed. He sounded utterly exhausted, in more ways than one. Loki looked around for the threat, his fingers prickling.

Rhodes noticed. “No need to stab anyone. Well, unless you can orchestrate the murder of a certain US senator.”

Loki perked up.

“I’m joking, no murder.” Rhodes waved his hands, chuckling in earnest when Loki’s face fell. “Not even if we both are  _ really  _ feeling it.”

“What happened?” Loki wondered. He swung his legs over the edge of the railing and sat atop it, uncaring of the vast, dizzying drop beneath him.

“I promised Tony I’d deal with the Accords. Pepper helped; she’s good with that kind of stuff, and he needs all his focus for, y’know.” Rhodes waved a hand expansively.

“It was unsuccessful?”

“You could say that.” A deep, conflicted sigh, and the soldier rubbed his face aggressively. “They don’t want him going.”

Loki stiffened.

“Yeah. They’re ruling to delay him—and everyone else. It’s because of who’s going, I know it is; I didn’t  _ tell _ them really, but they must have assumed those who were accompanying, if they weren’t me…”

“Were less-than-appropriate in their eyes.”

“Yeah. But we  _ can’t  _ delay. We can’t allow them to inspect our work. We can’t let them come here to Wakanda.”

“Why not?” Loki was genuinely curious. If these were irritating individuals, he might be permitted a few well-placed spells. 

“Because Ross  _ knows  _ Tony’s with the Rogues. And if he shows up, that’s it. Y’all will be arrested and imprisoned without trial under the gauze of ‘inspection’ and ‘gathering information’. We can’t let them keep us on Earth in this filibustering process of endless detainment.”

“But?” 

“But that’s the  _ law.”  _ Rhodes strangled something invisible in front of him, and Loki handed him a knife. The man seemed like he wanted it. “It’s the _ law,  _ and I  _ signed it.  _ I was  _ paralyzed  _ for that law.”

“I always find rules to be more trouble than their worth.”

“No offense, Loki, but you’re the  _ last  _ person I would ask about doing what’s required of you.” 

Loki smirked. 

The colonel let out another long sigh. “I just… I don’t know what to do.”

“What did you do?”

“I…” Rhodes glowered at him. “They told me to stop the project. And I told them we hadn’t started.”

Loki’s eyes widened. “O-oh?” he cooed.

“Shut up, space viking.”

“You  _ lied  _ to your kings! Colonel, I salute you! I admit, I never thought you had it in you, but I shall never doubt again.”

“I didn’t—I just—”

“You lied! My greatest pride in you!”

“Great, now Loki’s proud of me,” the colonel grumbled, letting his forehead fall against the railing. He let out a dramatic groan of anguish, but Loki refused to offer comfort. As far as he was concerned, Rhodes had preformed a rite of passage.

“Look, I’m far too okay with lying to the UN. For some reason,” Rhodes sighed. “But Tony won’t be.”

“Simple,” Loki said with a shrug. “Tell him you were blessed with permission. We reach into the stars, and no one is any the wiser until it is too late.”

“No.”

The word was sharp, definitive: so utterly certain that Loki’s mouth was caught half open between one word and the next. “... no?”

“No. I’m okay with lying to the UN. _But I will not lie to Tony._ Not about this, and not about anything.”  
“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh.” Rhodes huffed. “I’m no good at this; not even Pepper knows what to do… How am I supposed to tell him, and convince him not to delay until he can attempt to work things out?” ‘ _ He won’t be able to’  _ went unsaid. Rhodes continued, “what,  _ ‘Yeah, so the regulations you fought tooth and nail and mental stability for are saying you halt this mission for an indefinable amount of time, and I think you should agree but actually just go behind their back and continue everything the way you’re going.’  _ Yeah, that’ll go over well. He was always the speechy one anyway; I’m terrible at trying to get a point across.”

“Perhaps you are,” Loki said slowly, his mind whirring. “But I am not.”

Rhodes looked up sharply.

“They don’t call me the silver-tongue for nothing.” Loki smirked. “And everyone knows the strongest lie is not a lie at all. You are going to tell Stark the truth, and I am going to help you.”

The sun set across the Wankandan skyline as Loki told the most honest man he knew how to convince a Stark to betray his honor.

* * *

“Platypus, we can’t.” Tony was shaking his head, voice lowered to a harsh whisper in the hall outside their communal floor of living quarters. The others were asleep, awaiting the sixth day of their residency. 

Rhodey almost looked sick. “You know we don’t have time for them. You know we can’t afford this.”

“I’m a billionaire, I can afford anything. I’ll get through to them, I just need to—”

“Tony,  _ stop.”  _ Rhodey gripped his shoulder, looking Tony in the eye. “This isn’t about what you can do, or what you  _ should  _ do, it’s about what you have to do. And you have to save the universe. There’s no question.”

“I can’t just ignore—I have to get them on our side. It’s… it’s against everything to proceed without them,” Tony explained, almost desperately.

“If you give them permission to oversee this—”

“Then we have enough time to convince Ross to believe the story.” Tony’s gaze flickered up and to the left as he began to form his plan, the steps etching themselves out in rough outline. “They’ll send him as lacky, probably, at the worst. I’d relocate back to New York, work with Shuri remotely so the council doesn’t end up here without T’Challa’s permission. Gives an excuse to avoid Steve—”

“Tony.”

“—so that’s a plus. I could work more on the suit, deflect attention to the Mark 50. If I can show that the Earth will be defended while we’re gone, that we can handle this mission—”

_ “Tony!” _

Tony finally paused, Rhodey’s voice having risen substantially. His friend’s face was twisted, half grimace half snarl, and Tony knew exactly how heavy his legal signature was weighing on him in that moment.

“Listen to yourself, Tony,” Rhodey sighed. “It’s  _ Ross.  _ This hardly has anything to do with convincing him you can protect the world and handle the Stones. He’s perfectly aware of that; they all are. This has everything to do with the fact that he doesn’t like you. You have more power than him, and now that he’s being given the opportunity to exercise some over you, he’s seizing it.”

“Well, sure, but—”

“Tony. Run the numbers. How long will this set you back?”

Tony blinked. His gaze flickered as the quick calculations flashed in front of his vision, little silver fractals that painted an array of proof. Time and probability, just simple logic.

“Months,” Tony admitted. “At least three.”

“Too long.”

Tony didn’t answer.

“You aren’t working at the speed of international relations,” Rhodey insisted with a rueful grin. “You’re working as fast as you can. You’d be off in what, another week or so?”

“I...yes. That was the plan.”

“You need those months. Even with the warp core, travel’s gonna take time.  _ So much time,  _ and we don’t have it. Not to spend on the UN.”

“We should,” Tony growled. “That’s what we  _ promised  _ we’d do.”

“I don’t like this any more than you do, Tony.”

Tony’s growl continued, pitching up into a hiss as he ran his hands through his hair. They were shaking. He couldn’t—this was everything he  _ hadn’t  _ wanted to have to deal with. “No. I—I have to bring them in on this, Rhodey. Following the will of the entire world isn’t  _ optional,  _ just because it’ll inconvenience our plans. It isn’t optional to listen, because we think we know best! That’s the whole point of the Accords!”

_ To keep us in check. To stop the drastic mistakes that would do more harm than good. To keep power out of the wrong hands. _

_ Out of my hands.  _

“I know. I know! But it isn’t just about the timeline, Tony. It’s not just about doing the will of the democracy.”

“Then what’s it about?” Tony demanded. His hands had formed fists above his ears. “What else are we  _ possibly  _ pretending justifies that?”

Rhodey’s hand found his shoulder again. “‘If an enhanced individual violates the Accords, or obstructs the actions of those enforcing the Accords, they may be arrested and detained indefinitely without trial,’” he quoted. 

“Precisely. All the more reason to not  _ violate the Accords.” _

“What happens when Ross finds Peter, Tones?”

Tony’s words were snatched from his mouth.

“Last time, ‘detained’ meant imprisoned. And imprisoned meant the Raft. Imprisoned meant shock collars and straight jackets, possibly even torture. What happens when Ross finds Peter?”

The viceral, paralyzing image of Thaddeus Ross wrapping his hand around Peter Parker’s wrist struck Tony with all the strength of a freight train. 

_ Check-mate, Stark. _

Tony looked down, looked anywhere but at Rhodey.

“What happens? What happens when Ross finds out you’ve been hiding him? Hiding Loki _?” _

“Hiding me?”

The third, rumbling voice had the two men snapping their gaze up and sideways. Strange had appeared across the hall, in the mouth of a corridor that did  _ not  _ lead back to his quarters, his weight cascading into one leg and his arms crossed. He wore his Cloak, but had shed his usual navy robes for more civilian clothes. It was unsettling.

“Strange,” Tony barked, caught unawares. “Where’d you come from?”

Strange pointed back behind him, shrugged, and took a step forward. “You were being loud.”

“We weren’t being that loud,” Rhodes grumbled. 

Strange ignored him. “I take it the government’s not so avid about our decisions here?”

“You could say that,” Tony sighed. In some twisted way, he was grateful for Strange jerking them away from the subject of Peter. He needed to be objective about this. 

“Shocking.”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Like you’ve had this all predicted.”

“Maybe I have.”

Tony narrowed his eyes, but there was a bit of a glint in Strange’s own. Accepting the joke, Tony relaxed.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Rhodey observed. “Don’t you have something better to be doing?”

“Like sleeping? Nah. I slept last night.” Strange quirked his shoulders.

Tony allowed himself a grin. “Man after my own heart.”

“Don’t encourage him,” Rhodey told Strange. “He needs no more reasons to stay awake.”

“I seem to recall a loud conversation between you and him in the middle of the night.”

“‘He’ is still here,” Tony said, snapping his fingers for attention. “And he would also like to get back to the part where we manage the Accords council.”

“Ah yes,” Strange said. “Do continue.”

“You were the one who interrupted. Something to contribute?”

“Well, I wanted to add my name to the list of ‘individuals fucked upon discovery’. Not that I couldn’t take a few Secret Service agents, but I would prefer to avoid being pursued every time I need a decent sandwich.”

“ _ You _ could blow it off as just having become a wizard and use that as an excuse until you sign,” Tony said, waving a hand.

Strange stiffened. “I’m not signing.”

Tony tried not to let the feeling of his heart splashing into his gut show on his face. Strange saw it anyway.

“Oh. Right, um,” Strange cleared his throat. “You have to understand—what I do is not something that can be put on standby.”

“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Tony said flatly. 

“My Order is worldwide, and has been at work for thousands of years. We’re ancient, widespread, and absolutely secret.” Strange’s words were quick, a rambling attempt to explain. It was different from his usual drawl, almost in the same way future-Strange had spoken, and Tony thought offhandedly that he must truly care. 

“And you don’t know our purpose, our location, or our body-count because there are no casualties. Not many, at least, and property damage is the same. We work  _ differently  _ from you. And we work beyond this Earth. I fight interdimensional monsters. I’ve stopped threats from other universes from engulphing our entire dimension, above the skies of Asia and no one ever knew. The criteria of the Accords… they don’t apply. They simply can’t.”

“And why not?”

“Because I can’t let one group of individuals, one planet, decide the fate of thousands of other worlds that never gave consent. Worlds  _ ask  _ for the help of the Masters; this one did, long ago, and we hold to that oath even now.” Strange shook his head. “I can’t expose myself, or those worlds, or the Order.” 

The wizard took a breath, meeting Tony’s eyes with gathered strength. “I know you have fought for these laws. But I will fight for my own, if it comes to it.”

“So that’s it then,” Tony said. “You’re like them.”

Strange flinched. He actually  _ flinched _ , and the flicker of genuine emotion shifted Tony’s apathy, just slightly.

“I guess I am.” Strange lifted his chin. “If it means that the monsters of other worlds that pray to the sorcerers of Earth stay safe. And if it means that the people here beneath our watch stay alive. If it means that the beasts of the void don’t devour our dimension in a passing bite.

“I can’t sign those documents—not because my livelihood depends on it. Not because my freedom depends on it. Not because the future of my best friend from the 40s depends on it. Because the  _ universe  _ depends on it.”

Strange’s shaking hands had risen to mesh in his hair, the silvery waves at his temples peaking through them. He didn’t want to be having this conversation. 

Neither did Tony. God, what was he supposed to make of this? It was that stupid conversation in the stupid Compound over those stupid coffees all over again. As he was told that everything he believed was wrong. He’d thought—he’d thought Strange could be different, could be something separate, something fresh and different from those silken memories and cloying documents. 

Wrong. In no world, in no room, did those documents fail to shadow his every step. 

But then… Strange hadn’t been part of what caused their need for regulation. He hadn’t been there to negotiate them. He hadn’t chosen them, or fought against them; he and his ‘Order’ had simply been doing their jobs. And now that Tony knew they existed, did their jobs change?

Was it beyond arrogance to allow a dust-speck of a planet in a vast multiverse jurisdiction over all of it?

But then again, was it any different that a tiny group of sorcerers had jurisdiction over all of it?

Similar words for different circumstances. Were the circumstances different enough?

A sorcerer willing to die for the multiverse—a soldier willing to die for freedom. And Tony, willing to die for truth, for honor, for  _ life.  _

Was he willing to kill for it? If Strange wasn’t exaggerating—and from what Tony could see, he wasn’t—this wasn’t an Earthbound problem. Forcing him to sign, revealing the universes he had cultivated, could do more harm than good. 

But that’s what the Accords were  _ for.  _ They were supposed to tell him what to  _ do,  _ tell him what was right, so that when he was wrong, it wouldn’t hurt so much. So that when he was wrong, when people died, when the building fell and the child died—

It wouldn’t be his fault.

_ Willing to kill for it? _

“Please.”

The words shocked Tony’s gaze back to the wizard’s. 

Strange swallowed. Tony saw his pale throat bob. “Please understand. I don’t want—it’s nice. Not having to wrap a bandage on my own, I mean. I don’t want to lose that.”

_ Please understand.  _

Similar words for different circumstances.  

“Rhodey,” Tony said slowly.

“Yeah?” Rhodey was looking back and fourth between them, quick and interested and decidedly awkward.

“What’s the corollary on enhanced individuals not signing the Accords?”

“Oh, uh… ‘Any enhanced individuals who do not sign will not be allowed to take part in any police, military, or espionage activities, or to otherwise participate in any national or international conflict.’” 

Tony blinked. “Do you just… have that memorized?”

Rhodey looked affronted. “You  _ asked  _ me.”

“Where were you going with this?” Strange inquired slowly.

“‘National or international conflict.’” Tony lifted his hands. “Says nothing about interdimensional. Universal. And  _ conflict  _ doesn’t cover natural disasters.”

Strange’s eyes lit with something sparklingly hopeful. “So perhaps…”

“Perhaps you don’t apply not just in the spirit of the law, but in the letter as well.” Tony shrugged, then pointed a finger at the offending sorcerer. “I’m giving you a pass. Mostly because if I don’t, then I have to hate you. For consistency's sake. And I’m too tired for that; we’ve spent too long there already. So just—just don’t mention it, alright?”

Strange nodded vigorously, almost like Peter when he was trying to convince Tony he’d done the right thing in a particularly outlandish scenario. Tony rolled his eyes. 

“So, hate to break you two up, but this doesn’t solve our problem.” 

“No, I suppose not,” Strange said. Tony noticed he didn’t object to the  _ ‘our.' _

“See, I was hoping you’d forget about that,” Tony sighed, running his hands through his hair.

“Sorry Tones. Not letting you out of this one.”

Tony leaned against the wall behind him, blowing out another breath. He glowered at Rhodey, then at the far corner of the floor, then at the hallway, then at Strange’s uncannily pronounced cheekbones, then back to Rhodey. “We  _ signed,  _ Rhodey. More than that.”

“I know.”

“So just—we delay a bit! We… I can manage this. Bullshitting is my superpower; Ross won’t stand a chance, once he’s stuck in a room with me.” Tony forcibly resisted shooting Rhodey a set of finger guns; Peter hadn’t yet taken him over  _ that  _ far. 

“Maybe you could,” his friend sighed, “if he was anything other than a selfish, two-faced asshat. But that’s what he is; this isn’t about right, or wrong, or trust, or saving people. This is purely about power and control. Right now, Ross is winning the game.”

“And the only way we can continue is to stop playing,” Strange agreed quietly. 

_ “No.” _

“Tony!” Rhodey threw up his hands. “Look, I know how hypocritical this is! I know how much it dashes any  _ semblance  _ of confidence and honor we might have for ourselves. But lying is the only thing we  _ can  _ do.”

“We could make it work. We will; we  _ have  _ to.”

“These were people who were willing to  _ nuke New York  _ halfway through Loki’s first act. Kill  _ millions.  _ What do you think they’ll do when they find out you’ve been housing and protecting him for months?”

Tony snarled, searching for any words to combat that, but Rhodey ploughed on.

“And Peter? He’d be allowed to work within his own country, once he was registered. If you really believed in these documents and these people, you’d have had May sign for him long ago.”

And hell if that didn’t sting, because it was  _ true.  _ Tony’d even thought about doing so. He’d written up every step, had FRIDAY rehash the mechanics to make sure he’d be filling all the bases. And he hadn’t done it.

_ Fuck. _

“This isn’t about what happened in August, or what happened with Rogers and Barnes. That’s a whole other ball game. This is about the Infinity Stones, right here and right now.”

“No!”

“They’ll kill him, Tony! They’ll  _ kill  _ Loki, they’ll pursue Strange, they’ll arrest and try you for hiding the Rogues, hiding all of us! Peter’s identity will be out. We may never get to space, and we’ll be fractured when Thanos arrives. Sitting ducks, like we were in the Stalk, when you were killed, when who-knows-what-else happened! We can’t let Ross own the universe, Tony, we can’t even let him own this world. And we can’t let him get his hands on Loki—damn me to hell, but I think the god might even have changed. We can’t—”

“GOD FUCKING DAMN IT, ALRIGHT!” Tony roared. 

Silence echoed in the hall, followed by Tony’s ragged breathing.

“Fine,  _ fine,  _ fuck me in the ass,  _ fine.  _ I’ll build a fucking spaceship and pretend like I’m not breaking every one of my own rules, pretend like I’m not—pretend the wrongs aren’t wrong if done by me. Pretend I’m not as bad as—as  _ them,  _ or worse, that I should have chosen this all along.  _ I’ll fucking do it,  _ just—”

Seething with a fury directed at everyone and no one, Tony turned around and stalked down the corridor. The darkness swallowed him up without another word. 

  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going about the Accords differently in this story, I guess. They aren't such a main focus--I wish they could be, but I just don't have plot space to deal them justice--so I've mostly condensed the drama to this chapter, with a couple of aftershocks to be addressed later. Hope that isn't too disappointing! :) 
> 
> But anyway, I always thought it was interesting how in Infinity War, Rhodey's attitude toward the Accords has drastically shifted. I wanted to explore that a little bit, even if this was a different scenario, because his arc there is super cool. Also wish I could make that a focus but OH WELL... I also think the issues in CW are two separate things for him: the Accords themselves versus what happened with Steve and Bucky and Tony. Very separate issues. Idk. Rhodey is an amazing individual and I love and support him through all of his movies. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	96. Beyond

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now it's time for a montage.
> 
>  
> 
> A long montage.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

The shine of light off the metal of Shuri’s lab tables turned the entire world to silver. There was something about the smell of the power and the crackle of electricity in the atmosphere that let Tony’s guard down, that relaxed his shoulders and loosened his wrists. Greasy tools, organized scraps, the scrape of table and chair legs against a floor etched with swooping designs from so many scratches. The clicking of keys, the whir of fans, the yelps and sighs of voices, of teams moving to assemble the vision they all saw—it was familiar and comforting and Tony adored it. 

The columns and stairwells had folded against the walls of the lab, becoming supports and scaffolding for the enormous beast that was beginning to take shape within the area. It gleamed, a skeleton of broken starlight. Curling ribs brushed the windows, and reflective panels slotted against horizontal beams and screeching solderings. Suspended on its side, the ship was everything the room was dedicated to. 

Tony could hardly remember what it felt like to be able to breathe this easily. Every ounce of his concentration poured into the air, into the hands of so many others, clashed and worked and pooled with their own ideas. Shuri’s team was whip smart. Shuri herself ran everything with the ease and efficiency of a computer, each and every one of them slotting into their place as cogs on her enormous, well-oiled machine. 

It was fantastic. 

And if he was distracting himself, if he was hiding beneath grease and metal and innovation, than he couldn’t remember to hate himself for it. 

Tony took a breath, his lungs expanding fully, and kept at work.

* * *

“What time even is it?” Peter wondered as he lay upside-down in the spinney chair of the room T’Challa had brought him to. It felt like some mix of his room in the Compound, a restaurant booth, and a hotel room. Ned had one, and so did Loki. The latter hadn’t yet set foot in it as far as Peter knew. 

“Not sure,” Ned hummed in reply. “Time zones and stuff.”

Loki threw his phone at Peter, who caught it without looking up. “These built in clocks are quite accurate, I believe.” 

“Yeah, the wonders of tech, am I right?” Peter said absently as he clicked open Loki’s Starkphone. 

The first thing that surprised him was the time. It was apparently five in the morning, but the jet lag kept Peter rather energetic even from so many days ago. 

The second thing was Loki’s lock screen. He hadn’t realized the god had figured out how to take photos, much less change the standard settings, but there, blinking happily at him from the phone, was a well-photographed view from high in the air. It could have been from the plane, or simply from Loki’s own abilities. Either way, it was impressive. 

“Thanks,” Peter said, and chucked the phone back at Loki. “I like your lock screen.”

“Appreciation.”

All the blood was going to Peter’s head at this point; he gave Loki a thumbs-up that might have been a thumbs-down. 

“So what time is it?” Ned pushed. 

“Five in the morning.”

“Really?”

“Yup.” Peter popped the  _ p _ . Loki, across the room, mimicked him.

“Huh. Wild.”

“Indeed.” Peter sat up, lifting himself upright with nothing but his core. He asked somewhat randomly, “Where’s MJ?”

“Dunno. Plotting our demise, probably.”

“Maybe she’s with Shuri.”

Ned frowned. “I thought Shuri was in the lab…”

“Maybe MJ’s in the lab with Shuri with the spaceship!” Peter jumped to his feet. “Let’s go find her; I’m not tired anyway.”

Ned laughed. “Me neither, dude. Plus, it’s Wakanda! Let’s figure this place out!”

* * *

Tony could feel the intense heat warping the plastic in the fibers of his clothes as a clear glass reinforced to hold off all the power and pressure of a spaceship traveling seven times the speed of light coalesced against the skeletal shape of their vessel. Peter and Loki and Ned and MJ, at his side for hours, days, eternities yet, let out gasps of wonder.

Tony looked at them, a grin splitting through the sweaty pallor of his face. Peter grinned back. 

He’d ride to the ends of the world upon this machine, beside these people, Tony realized. And for a shining moment, it didn’t feel impossible. For a shining moment, it didn’t feel wrong.

* * *

Voices caught Stephen’s attention as he moved back toward the lab after his latest jaunt back to the Sanctum. His head was splitting from an hour spent wrangling and teaching the novices, but Wong’s soup sat warmly in his stomach and Stephen wasn't feeling badly. Ever since his words in the hall with Stark, the edge of forgiveness he’d been offered, there was a spring in his step. Not that he’d ever admit it. 

As he edged back toward the workshop, the hall echoed with excitable tones. Stephen paused. He thought he could pick out Shuri’s voice, and wondered if he was missing something important. Shifting his direction, Stephen made his way toward the conversation.

“So we were driving to Arizona, right?” It was MJ’s voice. “And my mother is just  _ done with life;  _ we’ve been driving a bazillion hours at this point. So I’m sitting there, minding my own business, and she suddenly just  _ announces  _ ‘who came up with Salt Lake City? Like, who decided “hey let’s build a civilization in the middle of fucking nowhere on the edge of a poisonous lake. Yeah, yeah that’ll work.”’”

A bought of laughter rang out, and Stephen’s lips twitched upward. Nothing important, then. He kept approaching anyway. 

“Oh, it gets better,” MJ said. “She’s like: ‘who decided—God. God decided that’s what was gonna happen. And Joseph Smith was like—’” MJ lifted her voice into a faux pitch— “‘“Okay!” And there they were. Same thing with Phoenix. “Oh yeah, the most inhospitable place in the universe, home sweet home.” Who decided that? And then who  _ came?  _ Who encouraged this bullshit?!’”

“Oh my God,” Peter’s voice choked out between wheezes of laughter.

“You’re mother is a  _ legend,”  _ Shuri gasped.

“Did she really say that? She really said that.” Ned sounded halfway to tears. 

The sprawling windows of the balcony opened before Stephen, a door spread open, and four teenagers lounged across the metal and concrete. They looked happy. 

Stephen smiled, and turned back toward the lab.

* * *

“Tony.”

Tony looked up—or rather, down. He was clinging almost upside-down to the inside of the growing frame of the ship, hair stuck up with grease, vision bright around the edges. He focused on Rhodey and Pepper, standing slightly inside the doorway.

“Yeah?” he said, swinging back upright.

“We did it,” Rhodes said hesitantly. 

“They bought it. Ross did, I mean,” Pepper elaborated. 

Tony blinked. The warm embrace of the workshop retreated slightly under the surge of nauseating guilt that attacked him at those words.

“Alright,” Tony said, and went back to work.

* * *

The way the night felt when it wrapped around Loki made him invincible. Dark and inky, starlit and heavy, there was nothing that could stop the slinking Asgardian as he breathed in the summer air and walked along the railing of the palace like a balance beam. The city spread out far beneath him in glittering swaths of serpentine scales, and Loki let the wind pull at his hair. He danced along on the balls of his feet, bare skin chilled and soft. 

Invincible in the night, Loki didn’t flinch when someone set their hands beside him on the rail. 

“Hello, Widow,” Loki said, stepping over her to continue his dance.

“Hello, Loki.”

He didn’t look back at her as he walked. “It is rather late.”

“Yup.”

Loki paused, carefully pivoting so he was facing out over the city. “My transfiguration is not limited to the feline form,” he said. “I can fly. So if you are considering trying to kill me, shoving me off the edge may not be the most efficient method.”

Romanoff didn’t comment. Instead she said, “why didn’t you shift in New York?”

Lifting his arms to test the wind, Loki answered, “because I could beat you without it. It was as much about pride as it was about power, back then.”

“Was it?”

Loki nodded. 

“Would you have made him kill me for pride, then?”

Loki didn’t have to ask who she was talking about. He closed his eyes, remembering the cloying, scraping thoughts that had lodged themselves in his brain and forced him to extremes that sickened him now—but forever not as much as they should. “Unless you had freed either of us from the Scepter, I would have.”

This time, he did look at her, and found her looking back. 

“And for that, I am sorry.”

Surprise had Romanoff stepping back, her gaze flickering. Loki continued, stuffing his hands in the pocket of his tunic and shifting to face her. 

“It was you I hurt, more than any of the others. It means nothing, and I understand, but I recognize the nature of your hurt. And I am sorry.” He sat, trying to look her in the eye,  _ forcing  _ himself to look her in the eye. 

“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I—” Loki took a breath. “My… my ledger. It’s dripping,  _ gushing  _ with red, and for the first time, I can see it. I would like nothing more than to ignore it, to wipe out that red, but it would be cowardly and unfair to all of us. So I am sorry, Romanoff. For what I have done.”

There was silence, for a long, long moment. Romanoff watched him with all the intensity of a jaguar, her gaze flooded with emotion and memory and something like turmoil.

And then, with jerky movements, she stuck out a hand. 

Loki took it, cautiously, and shook. Romanoff nodded with curt energy.

“Call me Natasha.”

* * *

Their silverwing ship curled through the lab in a crescent of dead eyes and motionless joints, a form waiting for life. The body was done, polished and complete. The wiring came next; the computation was laid out in a precise and intricate array of electricity and monitors, swirling around what would become its home.

And in the belly of the sting-ray, the pulsing vibrancy of their warp-core bathed everything in browns and greens. 

Tony slung his pliers over one shoulder. Craning his neck, he followed the curve of the ship up and toward the roof. It looked almost endless from his position. 

“Mr. Stark?”

Tony blinked, lowering his gaze toward the far corner of the room. A drowsy Peter Parker waved at him. Tony waved back. 

“You’re still awake, then?”

“Yup.” 

“Did you… how long have you been here?”

That was a good question. He’d left to go to the bathroom a few times, he supposed. “Not sure, kid. Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“Couldn’t sleep.”

“Ah. Just restless?”

“You could say that,” Peter sighed with the same quiet ruefulness that Tony knew so well. Nightmares, then. Well, trust an old Stark to deal with that. 

“C’mere, then.” Tony opened an arm, and Peter trotted across the room to where Tony was perched. Taking the kid’s shoulder, Tony led him around the back of the spaceship toward the final finished section. “Watch.”

Tony reached out, and using the edge of his fingernail, he rapped sharply on the metal. The  _ clang  _ reverberated into an even, melodious note. Peter’s eyes widened slightly.

“Pretty cool, huh?” Tony said. “The design maximizes not only our energy and defensibility, but the harmonics of our floors. Quite the coincidence.”

“Wow,” Peter breathed. He reached out, tapping the pannel next to Tony’s. A different note rang out, though it didn’t seem to follow a recognizable scale.

Peter wrapped again, and again, then glanced up at Tony. He quirked a lopsided grin. “Together?” The words were still tired, but no less comfortable, no less happy.

“Sure, kid.” Tony reached out to join him. 

The haunting melody boomed through the belly of the ship, and later, Tony thought he could hear it in the very bones of the machine. 

_ Together. _ The ship sang.  _ Together. _

* * *

The food in Wakanda was an absolute  _ symphony.  _ Peter shoveled it into his face at a speed May would cringe at—and did—eyes wide in absolute wonder. Two weeks, and this hadn’t gotten old. 

“My compliments,” he managed, “to the chef!”

From the door to the kitchen, an ebony-haired head poked out. “Gracious of you,” Loki purred, and saluted with his spatula. 

He was gone in half a moment, leaving Peter with nothing but his surprise.

The food tasted even better, after that.

* * *

Stephen’s hands shook more than usual as he carefully unwrapped the bandage across his shoulder. The three wounds were in no danger of re-opening, and they hardly hurt, but the puckered, weeping scabs needed redressing. Days on end, and he was still slowly stitching back together. He was only human, after all. 

Carefully folding the bandage across itself to hide any contaminated sections, Stephen smirked a bit. He could jump across universes with magic, but somehow couldn’t heal a few cuts. Perhaps that was ironic, though Stephen didn’t much care.

He hummed the first lines of his new song of the day—only a few minutes after midnight, the tune was fresh and sweet. Tucking the edge of the clean bandage beneath his arm, Stephen began to awkwardly rewrap the half-healed wounds.

“What are you—oh.”

Stephen glanced up sharply, startled by the voice. Being interrupted while sitting on his bed, shirtless and somewhat vulnerable, was not something he’d been expecting. But apparently he’d left his door open—or the Cloak had in its last excited jaunt around the living quarter corridors.

Stark stood halfway inside the room, his hand extended toward the doorframe. It seemed to have stopped before it got there. He blinked amber eyes, looking as startled as Stephen. 

“What are you doing here?” Stephen snapped, pausing in his bandaging.

“Nothing!” The man huffed. “Pepper locked me out of the lab so I would get some sleep. And there was light from this room.”

“I, uh, didn’t know I’d left the door open.” Stephen shifted, trying to keep the tension on the bandage, and glared at the door in question. “Sorry.”

Why was he apologizing? _ He  _ wasn’t the one walking in on shirtless sorcerers trying to exhibit self-care for once. Huffing, Stephen concentrated on the bandage. The feel of the soft fabric on his irritated collarbone was soothing, and he started humming again.

When he reached for his scissors to slice away the extra, he found them offered to him easily. Stark held them by the blades to give him access to the handles, standing close enough that Stephen could feel the warmth of the lab still clinging to the man’s form. He shivered.

Stephen accepted the scissors, then promptly used them to poke at the engineer who was definitely far too close. “Get some sleep, Stark,” he said pointedly.

“Sure,” Stark laughed, and left. He closed the door behind him. 

The next morning, Stark was singing Stephen’s song of the day under his breath.

* * *

“We have everything coded, then?” Peter asked as he leaned over MJ shoulder to see her screen. 

She elbowed him in the stomach rather forcefully. “Give a girl room to breathe, would you? Yes, we have everything coded. I’m just looking over the calculations for Shuri.”

“Because you are so wonderfully helpful,” Shuri purred from where she clung halfway up the side of the spaceship, sealing off the last of the panels to bolt in the wiring. 

The ship was an absolute wonder to behold. Peter thought it looked like a scorpion curling into a perfect spiraling shape, like a liquid poured across the outside of a tube. It’s texture was natural, its materials light, and its interior as homey as any of them had been able to design. In the light of the lab, incandescent vibranium shone beneath—of course—red and gold. But the colors were twisting in the beautiful patterns unique to this very lab, a little signature from both of its creators.

“It needs a name,” Ned proclaimed. He was leaning against one of the desks, kicking at a spinning chair with excitable intensity. 

“It does,” Loki agreed. “Every good vessel has a name.”

Tony narrowed his eyes at them. “Logic is telling me that under no circumstances should I let you name the ship.”

“It’s a group effort!” MJ insisted. “Let’s have a go.”

A few names were offered; embarrassed suggestions from Ned and unpronounceable ones from Loki. Peter liked them. But this was their first ever spaceship, the biggest journey of his life, and he wanted it to be  _ clever,  _ to be  _ powerful— _ and most of all, he wanted a reference.

So when he finally yelped, “oh I know!” he was beaming.

The rest of the group turned to him, looking interested. “Shoot.”

“We should call her the  _ Beyond.” _

Silence for a moment, as Shuri and Tony mulled that over. Shuri nodded after a moment. “ _ Beyond _ ,” she said. “I like that. Because she’s going beyond anything we ever imagined.”

MJ rolled her eyes. “Of  _ course  _ that’s not the reason,” she said. Shaking her head, she jabbed a finger in Peter’s direction. “Peter wants to call her that because then we’ll be going ‘to infinity and Beyond.’”

Peter, grinning, nodded vigorously.

And Tony, perched atop the nose of their ship, burst out laughing. 

“No way in all hell I’m going to space in anything that isn’t a fucking Toy Story pun, now,” he said. “ _ Beyond _ it is.”

* * *

The Mark 50 closed around Tony with a fizzle of nanotech, lighting and warming and comforting in all the right places. “Hey,” he called into the helmet. “You there?”

“Hello, boss!” FRIDAY’s joyful voice seemed to bounce around him. “Welcome home. I’ve missed you.”

“I’ve missed you too.”

Tony lifted a gauntlet, watching the way the nanotech glided over his fingers. It reeked of power and potential, Shuri’s experience boosting the speed of the processes, and Tony knew he was wearing the most deadly weapon, the most useful tool, he’d ever create.

But that wasn’t why he’d put it on. He was going to space, and he needed every one of his cards—trump or throwaway, Tony was ready to play his hand.  

“FRI, I need a favor. Unlock 17A for me, would you?”

* * *

Wong was waiting for him when Stephen stepped out into the familiar dusty air of his Sanctum, sparks shimmering into nothingness behind him. He looked relatively pleased to see Stephen, who couldn’t hide his smile as he swept across the floorboards to stand before the librarian.

“Who died while I was gone?” Stephen wondered, crossing his arms before his chest.

“Far less than those who died while you were here.”

“Aw, I missed you too.”

Wong softened, lifting a hand to squeeze Stephen’s shoulder. They started off across the winding veranda beneath the Seal of the Vishanti, and the Cloak drifted away from Stephen to wind about the high-ceilinged space. Stephen watched it with a smile. 

“I hope it won’t mind being cooped up for so long,” he sighed, pausing in the stairwell. The Cloak fluttered at him before zooming away to rebalance the Cauldron of the Cosmos where it had migrated slightly off-center on its stand. 

“No more than the rest of us,” Wong answered. Stephen glanced at him, accidentally made eye-contact, and crossed his eyes to make up for it.

Huffing, Wong released his shoulder, a grin twitching his lips. “I assume you’ll be leaving soon, then?”

“Yes. They’ve completed the ship. And named it.”

“Oh?”

Stephen hummed. “Yeah.  _ The Beyond.” _

Wong nodded, looking distant for half a heartbeat. “Good name,” he said softly. “Good energy.”

“It’s a Toy Story reference.”

“I take everything back.”

Stephen laughed, and the motion felt free and clean. He remembered failing to understand said reference until he’d caught Jones doodling Buzz Lightyear under what would become his window with a green sharpie. Wong’s reaction was not so different from his own. 

“I’m putting my life in these people’s hands, Wong,” Stephen said with dramatic slowness. “I’ll see you in the next life.”

“I could still go with you.”

Stephen shook his head. “No, you couldn’t. Even a spaceship propelled by magic has its limits, and ours is six.”

Wong grunted disapprovingly. Finished with it’s jaunt, the Cloak settled back around Stephen’s shoulders and poked at the man with one of its corners. Absently, Wong trailed his fingers over the edge, and the Cloak fluttered happily. 

“How far are your preparations?” Wong wondered.

Stephen shrugged. “I have few belongings, aside from clothes and staples. I’ve been passing the others between the ship and their homes, though, to bring necessary supplies and weapons. Tools.”

“Good.”

“Hm. We’ve thought it through.”

“That means very little, in the scheme of this universe,” Wong huffed.

Stephen grinned ruefully. “Oh, I am aware. I’ll give us two months.”

“Until something goes wrong? That long?”

A pause. Stephen amended, “okay, one month.” 

Wong sighed, twitching his half-smile again, before starting off toward the library and the portal doors—which Stephen had begun affectionately referring to as ‘doortals’. They were set to their natural gateways when the two sorcerers arrived. Stephen breathed ocean spray and rainforest sweetness in a single inhale. 

He would miss the freedom of portaling when moving at the speed of light. It was ironic, he supposed; traveling more distance than he ever had with a sling-ring in the blink of an eye, yet trapped within still metal walls.

Wong reached out, cupping the doorknob of one of the gateways and turning, flashing through locations until the dusty air of Kamar-Taj blew into New York. A sharp breath from Stephen, and the other man turned.

“Let’s go,” he said. 

Wong had known. Of course he’d known—it wasn’t that hard to guess. At least Stephen wouldn’t have to say it aloud, wouldn’t have to find words.

“Right, yes.” But his feet seemed stuck to the floor, glued there with dried memories and blood.

“Strange.”

“I know, I know…” Stephen swallowed, rough as sandpaper. Humming the lyrics to Jack Garratt’s ‘Coalesce’, he forced himself over the threshold to Kamar-Taj. It wasn’t the academy that caught Stephen’s heart in his throat, of course. It wasn’t Nepal that kept sent him almost shivering. It wasn’t the carved walls or the worn stone, the familiar light or the scent of incense. Not Kamar-Taj, never Kamar-Taj.

But within these carved walls, upon this worn stone. Bathed in this familiar light and curling with the scent of incense… 

Kamar-Taj held their Order. It held the council and the Masters, held the training of the novices, held the past and the future. It held their secrets, their treasures, their stories. 

Their relics.

Stephen would wear the Time Stone once more.

* * *

Peter Parker stuffed everything he owned, everything he couldn’t live without, into a suitcase. He looked to the stars.

  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's HAPPENING


	97. Imagine That

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

On January 27th, 2017, the cavernous mouth of the Wakandan mountain opened wide. 

It seemed MJ’s destiny to always and forever be utterly awestruck by Shuri and her country and any given moment. There was always more to see, always more to learn, always more that these brilliant people and their ancestors had accomplished.

But on January 27th, 2017, MJ wasn’t awestruck. She wasn’t impressed, she wasn’t eager, and she certainly wasn’t happy.

No one noticed. She made sure of that.

The engine of their ship purred with magic as the light of the summer sun fell through the now-open shaft into the lab. She felt like she was walking on starlight, dripping down the walls to pool within the groping curves of the spaceship. Tilted up toward the sky, the vessel sat in eager suspense, just waiting for its final push to ascension. Some part of MJ was proud of it. 

“How does it feel,” a voice called from beside her (accented and cocky; Shuri, then), “to be watching the maiden voyage of history  _ you  _ helped to write? Michelle Jones, any comment?”

“You sound like Bill Curtis,” MJ huffed, shoving at her friend as the other girl held out a curled hand like a fake microphone. 

Shuri chuckled. “Bold of you to assume I wasn’t trying.”

“I never assume. Do you even know who that is?”

“Sure. He’s that guy on that one radio show.”

MJ rolled her eyes. “That could be any one of hundreds.”

“Whatever. The one that makes fun of American news.”

MJ lifted a finger to tap an imaginary bell. “Ding! That’s the one.” 

“I know; I’m a genius. I want to be on that show one day. Maybe they’ll let me.” Shuri dramatically palmed her enormous braids, making some ridiculous face that had MJ snorting. 

“Not if you ever,  _ ever  _ do that again,” she chuckled.

Shuri grinned. “Stowing that away for later use.”

There was a pause as both girls turned their gaze back to the ship. Someone waved to them from the cockpit, only their silhouette visible. Observation one; the short stature at wide shoulders. Observation two; the confident, excited movements. Conclusion; it was Stark, running last-minute diagnostics for the umpteenth time. 

It made sense, MJ supposed; you wanted to be prepared. Still, some part of her hoped he’d find something wrong, just so they might stay one more day, one more hour.

So he might stay. Just long enough for her to  _ do something.  _

The thoughts weren’t getting her anywhere, however, and MJ shoved them away in favor of wondering how Stark was still upright after at least five days of minimal sleep. Screw his enormous intellect or his heart or whatever; Iron Man’s superpower was his tenacity. 

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Shuri hummed.

MJ blinked at her, then at the ship. “Yeah,” she said. “Did you expect anything else from us?”

Shuri chuckled, slinging an arm over MJ’s shoulders. “Well, obviously not. But I didn’t expect something so… aesthetic. It’s not very  _ Star Wars  _ at all.”

MJ snorted. “Yeah, I think Ned’s disappointed.”

“Ned can take his little geek ass to town some other time.”

The  _ shick  _ of the lab doors opening cut through their conversation, along with the sound of footsteps. There were many sets—MJ hypothesized them belonging to Vision, Wanda, Rhodes, and Potts respectively. When she craned back over her shoulder, she was wrong for all but one; she’d mistaken Happy Hogan for the Colonel. 

“Here comes the Round Table,” MJ mused. 

“How’re we looking?” Pepper wondered, trotting over to them. 

In response, MJ handed her the walkie-talkie they’d been using to communicate clearly to those inside the ship. Of course, it wasn’t actually a walkie-talkie; it had some decidedly snobbish Wakandan title. But calling it the former irritated Shuri, so MJ didn’t intend to stop anytime soon. 

“Tony? What’s the status up there?” Pepper said. Each of them craned around to hear the response.

“All systems are go, blah blah blah,” Stark’s voice buzzed back. “Over.”

MJ rolled her eyes.

“Good. The rest of your crew should be arriving soon.”

“I would hope so!” Stark’s crackling voice was tinged with laughter. “It’s already six in the morning! We’ve wasted half the day!”

“I’ll be sure to tell Peter he missed his headstart on the sun,” MJ contributed.

“Bet you six dollars he’s still asleep and will be the last one here.”

“Oh, I’m on your side.” MJ smirked; not even the first day of the rest of his life would keep Peter Parker from stealing a few more minutes of sleep. She'd be the same way.

_ I say, standing here in the lab at six in the morning. _

The lab doors echoed their opening again; three more sets of feet caught everyone’s attention. The hallway spat out three Rogues, two of them slung with the last of their belongings and one watching the ship with an air of utter disappointment. Rogers had trimmed his beard to something more manageable and was looking at the ship with the eyes of someone still not accustomed to the idea of traveling within it. Romanoff was looking at them; casting interested, calculating eyes over each of them.

MJ liked the woman. She wished she’d had more time to get to know her.

“Is everything in motion?” Rogers wondered. None of the three wandered across to join them. “Anything need doing?”

“Nope,” Shuri said, snapping her fingers. “Unless Tony finds something catastrophic here at the end of the next systems check.”

“Great.” Romanoff nodded, then slipped her small, zipped duffel off her shoulder to rest it on her feet.

“T minus an hour and a half until takeoff,” MJ recited in a practiced monotone.

“Time enough for a thirty-sixth systems check!” the not-walkie-talkie buzzed. 

“That’s called obsessive compulsive disorder!” Pepper called back at it.

“Add it to the pile.”

Potts chuckled, waving at the high-temp quartz cockpit glass. Stark waved back. 

Observation one: the ruefulness in Potts’s smile. Observation two: the hesitance of her hand as it lowered back to her side, as if part of her yearned to keep it outstretched. Observation three: the slight tilt of her head as she looked back to the Rogues.

Conclusion: maybe MJ wasn’t the only one sorry to see this ship take off. 

Someone else came flying up behind them a few moments later, looking decidedly frazzled. May Parker definitely hadn’t slept well, or possibly at all. MJ didn’t blame her.

Before the woman could ask, MJ said, “everything’s going fine, don’t worry. Takeoff should and will go absolutely smoothly.” 

“Good, uh, fantastic,” May gasped, running her hands through her hair and picking at one of the tangles. Someone laid a hand on her shoulder.  Rogers.

“It’ll be fine,” he assured. “Tony and Shuri are the smartest people I know; if anything could go wrong, they’ll have accounted for it.”

It spoke to the tension of the morning that May took the Captain’s words with nothing more than a nod. She even looked thankful.

It wasn’t long before Loki had joined them in the workshop, stressed and shifting. He was followed shortly by Strange, who wore an large bronze pendant MJ hadn’t seen before. T’Challa even made his appearance, falling into a secret handshake with Shuri that would have made even Ned and Peter impressed. 

Ned, speaking of, arrived in a panting trot an hour before takeoff. The missing Colonel showed up not seconds later, finishing up a phone call even as he stepped through the doorway. The crowd of heroes, familiar and alien, stared up at the sky over the crest of their ship and wondered what it would feel like to watch it rise up through that beautiful, onyx shaft of the mountain.

And then came Peter. Peter, who had his Spider-Man mask poking out of the back collar of his shirt, Peter who’s hair remained uncombed in the early routine, Peter who was grinning and not at all ashamed to be the last one here,  _ Peter. _

MJ’s chest twisted down into her gut and she looked at her feet.

“Damn. I could be up six bucks about now,” Stark’s voice sighed. It sounded like static.

“Hey, everyone!” Peter exclaimed, trotting over to wrap his arms around his aunt. He was vibrating with an energy that MJ could only describe as exhilarated.

Observation one: he held no bag or last-minute additions to the journey. Observation two: his eyes followed the ship even as he spoke to May, even as he hugged and assured her pointlessly that she didn’t need to worry. Observation three: the smile he shared with Loki as the raven form of the god shifted into a humanoid beside him.

Conclusion: Peter Parker would get on that ship without looking back. 

It hurt. It hurt  _ so badly,  _ and MJ didn’t know if it was supposed to, if it was supposed to feel like everything inside her was turning inside out. If it was supposed to feel like getting left behind. 

Peter smiled at her, and MJ smiled back. 

He was skipping over to them a moment later, squeezing into the circle and making grabby hands for the not-walkie-talkie. Shuri handed it to him.

“Mr. Stark! Anything need doing?”

“Hey kid. Not that I can think of, I’m just running diagnostics.”

“Again?”

The not-walkie-talkie crackled with what might have been a laugh or a sigh. “I’ve got six assholes I need to transport between here and infinity. I’m being careful.”

“I’m  _ shocked.”  _ Rhodes leaned over to speak into the phone. “You? Careful?”

“Ha ha, Platypus. You’re hilarious.”

“No, I’m right.”

Peter pulled the not-walkie-talkie away from the colonel, shoving him back to his place in the circle. “So everything’s good? We’re just gonna… get on a spaceship in forty-five minutes and… that’s it? Blast off?”

“That’s right, kid.”

Peter frowned. “Sounds a lot less complicated than usual.”

“Nothing about this is usual,” Romanoff huffed. “Even at SHIELD. You two are revolutionary.”

“Thanks, we know,” Stark and Shuri said simultaneously. 

The latter fumbled the phone back from Peter, setting it behind her on the table and facing all of them. “What about you guys?” she said. Her gaze traveled across Strange, Peter, Loki, Romanoff, and Rogers with calculating efficiency. “Have everything?”

Nods from all five.

“Right.” Shuri clapped her hands. “So, here’s our game plan. Accelerating to twenty times the speed of light—thank you, wizards—will take twenty-eight and a half days to undertake; it’s an exponential relationship, there. We drew it out so that you wouldn’t have to strap in and not move for an entire month. Once you get to lightspeed, the final jump will be made in twelve days and about six hours. Make sense?”

A chorus of understanding. Observation one: The disinterest on Loki’s face and the fidgeting coming from Captain Rogers’s direction. Conclusion: there was rather less understanding than previously communicated. 

“Alright. Deceleration is a lot quicker; it can be done in one day if you’re strapped in the entire time. Otherwise, eleven days. Got that?”

More nods.

“Me and Tony have done all the math to get you to Asgard, but after that, you’ll have to manage your time with just him. So look out.” The Wakandan tapped her chin, eyes sliding down and sideways in thought. “Yeah. There should be supplies for four months, so ration accordingly. Remember;  _ no stops.  _ Stopping means you don’t get to Asgard before Loki’s sister shows up.”

“Which should be avoided,” Loki said. “At all costs.”

“Got it, no stops,” Rogers nodded, looking between the god and the engineer.

“Any other questions?” Shuri said, rubbing her hands together.

They’d been through this before, of course, and so much more than this. But fifteen minutes went by in a haze of repetition and reinforcement, punctuated by Shuri’s deft ability to focus everything around the main points.

Which consisted of: stop the ship as little as possible; find places to refuel and restock and work them into the timeline; do not touch the warp core; do not activate the weaponry if at all possible—doing so diverts power from the core and the gravity; and stay active and mentally stimulated so you don’t kill your crewmembers.

All in all, it sounded like a good list. MJ hated everything about it. 

Stark joined them halfway through Shuri’s rant, standing between Loki and Peter. The bruises beneath his eyes seemed to have bruises of their own, but he looked excited. MJ scrubbed her face with her hands—for the fourth time in the last fifteen minutes.

“Alright,” Stark exclaimed, once Shuri had concluded her debriefing. “All those flying to space, let’s get you situated. I want to be strapped in in ten.”

“Okay,” Peter said, and the others nodded. 

MJ found herself holding her breath. Rogers and Romanoff turned to their team, edging slightly toward the other end of the room. MJ assumed the Captain and his wolf had already made their goodbyes, as Barnes was missing in action. Loki moved to circle next to Vision, speaking softly to the android with a nudge and a smirk. Beside MJ, Stark moved to clap Rhodes on the shoulder, and the other man pulled him into a hug.

“I expect updates,” Rhodes mumbled. “And your continued existence.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Happy and Pepper folded in around the two, and they broke apart, leaving Stark to snark a farewell to his bodyguard. Rolling his eyes, Happy hugged the engineer as well.

Then it was Pepper’s turn, long fingers pulling Stark toward her, speaking words MJ chose not to hear. The smile the man gave her was threaded with melancholy. When she pressed her lips to the top of Stark’s head, MJ looked away, her heart crawling up into her throat and dying on her tongue. 

How could they bare it?

Peter’s voice found her ears; he was talking to May, smiling with Ned. MJ should move over there, should say something,  _ anything,  _ to remind herself that this was fine. That she’d agreed to this. That everything would be fine. 

MJ didn’t move over to him. In a desperate attempt to pull her attention elsewhere, she looked to Strange. Lingering alone a few paces away from her, their wizard had his hands tucked away in his Cloak and his eyes silently following everything around him. He felt her eyes on him, and blinked at her.

“No one to say goodbye to?” she wondered, trotting over toward him. 

“I already did.” Strange’s lips twitched up. “He told me to have fun while he did my job. It’s Wong’s way of saying he’ll miss me.”

“Hm.”

Strange blinked at her again. Conclusion: he was observing her in return.

“Go on,” he said, and stepped back.

MJ frowned, and when she glanced up, she found another pair of eyes on her. A chocolate gaze, trying to hold back its concern and maybe even its hurt, watched her.

No more putting it off, then. 

MJ rolled her shoulders back and strode across the lab to stand before Peter Parker. She took a breath. Another.

_ Get it together,  _ she hissed at herself.  _ You’re fine, you’re always fine.  _

“Break a leg, loser,” she said, hating herself for it. 

Peter smiled. 

And then he hugged her, tighter than he’d ever hugged her before. She felt the way he dipped into that endless well of enhanced strength, drawing up just a little more than what would be comfortable. His chin was tucked into her shoulder, and she was wrapping her arms around him just as tightly, inhaling that smell of mint and shampoo, that smell she might never breathe again. It was everything she couldn’t ignore, a message etched into the curve of his shoulders.

_ I’ll miss you. _

Resolutely, painfully, MJ didn’t cry. It was easier to feel less than to crest that edge into tears.

Then Peter stepped away, standing beside Stark, beside Loki, beside so many others who were powerful and intelligent and determined and sacrificial. And he didn’t look small. Not in the least. He looked like he belonged with them.

“Be safe,” MJ said. “I’ll expect you back in time for graduation.”

And that was it.

Just like that, their little group, their little  _ family,  _ had severed down the middle. Nine to stay, six to board, with bags slung over their shoulders and eyes lifted toward the stars. Six to leave, to pursue their destiny, to leave her here to pursue a destiny she didn’t understand, not yet, not ever. 

Her hand twitched forward as they left. Her last chance to reach out, to try and pull them,  _ him,  _ back to her. 

MJ remembered how it felt when her brother had stepped on that plane. She remembered the smile he’d thrown her way before he disappeared through the gate for what felt like eternity. She remembered how she’d stood strong when her mother had cried, when MJ hadn’t cried, not for him, not ever.

This didn’t feel like that. Not at all. 

MJ had stopped observing anything at all when Pepper Potts stepped up beside her. The woman put a hand on her shoulder. Looked at her, looked  _ at  _ her. Like she understood.

“You can’t wait for him,” Pepper said quietly. “Because he won’t wait for you.”

Stark had disappeared behind the little door, and Peter was left alone and waving on the ramp, and she was crying, and Pepper was just  _ looking  _ at MJ and then her feet were moving, her arms were pumping, and she was  _ flying  _ up that gangplank, trying to convince herself of nothing. There was nothing to hide anymore, there never had been, and this boy would never see it because he was just so  _ stupid  _ and genius and kind and righteous and yes, fine, MJ was in love with him, God she’d been in love for who knew how long, now. 

So there, on the gangplank of a spaceship heading to infinity, MJ kissed him. 

Kissing Peter Parker wasn’t magical or beautiful or passionate. It was clumsy and awkward and uncertain and as soon as MJ had moved she was pulling back, pulling away. Half of her was grinning in elation, in satisfaction, and the other half was absolutely  _ panicking  _ because she had definitely done that wrong. And oh  _ fuck  _ did she want to do it again, more than she’d ever wanted anything else in her life.

“Oh,” Peter said. Because of course he did. 

“Idiot,” she murmured, and stepped back. Peter swayed like a dry leaf in a winter gale, stuck in place in the  _ Beyond’s  _ doorway, and there was so much emotion running across his face that MJ gave up trying to take conclusions for it.

“I—” he stuttered. “I don’t know what—”

“I’m in love with you, Peter,” MJ said, clearly and concisely. And oh, imagine that, imagine that it didn’t hurt coming up her throat, didn’t kill her as she spoke it aloud. “You don’t have to say anything, or do anything.”

He didn’t. All he did was blink in that utterly endearing way, his hand still twined with hers. She didn’t remember when she’d taken it.

Everyone was watching them, she realized all at once. She didn’t care, but Peter did—he didn’t know what to think for himself, so he was trying to gauge it off others, trying to gather information. She wanted to kiss him again, watch that mind short-circuit until he reached a conclusion of his own.

But they were standing in the doorway of a spaceship, and launch was in five minutes. Less. So MJ dropped his hand and turned, and when she walked away her head was high and her shoulders were back and she was smiling.

“Go, Peter,” she called over her shoulder. “Go save the world.”

It still hurt to say it, to walk away; it hurt that he wouldn’t call her back. That she’d chosen this moment, the  _ last moment,  _ to act. But she wouldn’t wait, and neither would he.

It was the universe over her, no question. And though MJ was glad it was that way, though she would choose the same herself, it didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.

When she looked back again, she was standing beside Pepper and May, and Peter was gone. She saw his shadow through the door as it rolled its last inch to sit sealed. The  _ Beyond  _ sat full, and MJ stood empty.

The countdown was quick, and takeoff was quicker. No one spoke but Shuri in turse, technical terms, and no one saw anything but the light curve through the jets of the ship with magic and fire and then there was only the roar and the lift-off and the sky waiting through the shaft of the mountain before them. 

_ Gone,  _ the ship was  _ gone,  _ and they were gone with it. 

When she next saw Peter, it would be in a different universe, with a hoard of different memories. Or she’d never see him again. 

MJ watched the  _ Beyond  _ rise into the sky, toward adventure, toward hope, and tried to read it. 

Observation one,

Observation one,

Observation one…

  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gdhsldiuaridsjhsiusk--
> 
> MJ I love you
> 
> Anyway, big finale chapter for Part Two coming next!!! I'm super excited for it so it'll hopefully be done quick! :D


	98. The Taste of Cinnamon

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HERE IT IS!
> 
>  
> 
> Also, sorry for scaring you last chapter--this is NOT the end. What I meant calling it the finale was that it's the end of this part; Part Two started chapter 43, I think. Long time ago, lol. But yes, enjoy this, and much more to come!!!

 

**Dreamscape-200004, Adjacent Astral Plane:** **_May 2018_ **

 

It had been so long since he’d set foot upon his home.

So very long since he’d seen the view of the suns against his horizon. So very long since he’d touched the curling winds of this world, felt its uneven embrace. Since he’d breathed its air and tasted its future and its past, since he’d listened to its song. The song was broken, today—a lilting, scratching tune that he heard within his own blood. Then again, home had always sounded of his blood. 

It had been so very long since Thanos had heard it. 

All this time, after all this death and sacrifice, he didn’t remember ever feeling quite this angry. He hadn’t even thought such fury possible, not before he’d seen the reddish sky and the baked ground of a world that had once been so beautiful. It had been so long. When the end had happened, Thanos had long since flown for the stars, long since abandoned trying to reason with a people intent on death. He’d heard about their end, of course. He’d mourned it. 

But he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t  _ avenged  _ it. 

His head cracked to the side, the force of a supernova exploding against it. Thanos felt skin tear, felt the cold of metal and the bite of pain penetrate. He smiled. 

Lifting a hand, he trailed dusty fingers along the top of his cheek. They came away wet. Shaking his head, Thanos turned his gaze forward into the blinding light of Titan’s setting sun.

Tony Stark’s helmet stared back at him with expressionless strength. So pointless and yet so determined, the ant that had always run the furthest. Thanos could understand that. For a Terran, Stark was a wonder. For a citizen of this universe, he was an annoyance. 

But it was impressive, really, how far the man had come. It truly was a shame what Thanos would have to do to him, now.

“All that for a drop of blood,” the titan rumbled, halfway between a laugh and a sigh. He brushed the blood between his fingers, smiled at the mask before him.

And swung a fist in a bone-shattering uppercut, sending Stark pinwheeling backwards away from him. Iron Man tried to stand, tried to find the power of his suit, but Thanos was already there. He hammered against the man, single fist pounding again and again against arms desperately raised in defense, listening to the rhythm like a drumbeat beneath the melody of the Stones. Again, again; Stark grunted beneath the assault. Thanos opened his fist, pressing his palm against the cool bronze of the visior.

Clenching fingers in the creases of the metal, fisting the gauntlet on his other hand, Thanos lifted the Terran from the reddening ground. Stark raised his hands, as if to pry away Thanos’s grip. The Power Stone hummed, a voice Thanos was growing used to, growing to love. He slammed the metal and infinite energy into Iron Man’s gut. Not even his own grip could break the force, and Stark went flying once more.

Thanos could see skin, bare clothing beneath shattered metal as the man stumbled back to one knee, then to both feet. Snarling, Thanos raised the back of his hand. A blast from Iron Man’s glove struck it uselessly. A second beam joined it, and Thanos didn’t falter.

He could feel the blood gathering in the tiny laceration on his face. He could feel the pounding of his ceaseless steps in the song of his destroyed planet, in the beat of his heart. Stark’s suit reformed like waves rolling over the coast. The metal never quite reached his face.

Thanos could see concentration in the onyx eye that peered at him through that shattered visor. He could see determination and the gleam of fury. 

And he could see fear. The spark of it, back behind that hardened expression. 

Behind the aura of flame and power sparking between them, Thanos smiled. 

It seemed he’d already won. 

His fist came again, colliding with the armoured side of Stark’s face with enough force to shatter the metal that coated it. Titanium cracked into dust beneath his fist. Thanos cut with the gauntlet, only to land between Stark’s crossed forearms as the man barely held the uru and infinity from finding its mark. Stark's face, fully bare now, was filthy with blood and dust. 

As Thanos loomed above him, he took a heartbeat to peer at the man. He’d thought Stark would look weaker without the armor. It was not so.

Throwing his gauntlet to the side, Thanos grimaced with the effort of breaking through Stark’s hold. Stark reacted instantly to his slight vulnerability. He threw his fist, which Thanos caught without blinking. He could hold Stark’s entire hand between his fingers. For a moment, the titan considered squeezing, considered shattering Stark’s gauntlet and the fingers they protected. 

He would have, had Stark not lunged again. A blade had extended from Iron Man’s knuckles, sleek and clean. Thanos sidestepped it. Stark’s fist was still trapped within his own, even as Thanos pinned the man’s wrist to his chest and snapped the blade from the suit. Conveniently, it didn’t disintegrate. Conveniently, it was sharp and serrated like the spear Thanos had given Corvus Glaive.

Conveniently, it sliced through armour and skin like a hot knife through butter as he plunged it deep into Stark’s body. 

And suddenly, even the wind was holding its breath. Stark’s hands, now free, crawled slowly to the blade sprouting from his abdomen. He looked up, eyes wide with shock, and a single hand pressed weakly against Thanos’s chest as he stumbled backwards. The titan followed. The coppery scent of Terran blood was overpowering, enough to send Thanos’s head spinning. 

In the distance, he thought he heard a child scream. 

Step by step, Thanos forced Stark backward until the man’s heels caught on the rubble around them and his legs gave out. Thanos kept a hand wrapped around the blade, letting it slide agonizingly deeper with each of Stark’s strangled breathes. 

And yet, in the eyes that turned up toward him, the fear was gone. Beneath the hazy aura of pain, Thanos thought he saw resignation. Satisfaction. At Stark’s neck, nanotech pulsed futility upward, trying to reform the destroyed helmet, an effete attempt to die strong. 

He didn’t need the helmet to do so, Thanos wanted to tell him. It wasn’t your tools that made you strong, wasn’t your weapons that made you good. It was your will, dark and shining, that kept you looking into the face of your enemy—kept you looking into the face of your friend, your daughter, your son. 

“You have my respect, Stark,” Thanos murmured truthfully. He placed the gauntlet atop the man’s head, letting his palm curve around to support his neck. “When I'm done, half of humanity will still be alive.”

Perhaps this man would be among them, if Thanos let fate decide. But it was better this way, better to let the stubbornness die here than risk it festering in a poor soul unable to see what it had been gifted. Part of Thanos wished he’d found Stark earlier. Perhaps then he would have been able to show him, make him understand. How much faster this could have been, had Earth fought beside him. 

Thanos stepped back, releasing Stark and the blade still buried deep, and raised his fist. “I hope they remember you.”

Stark’s gaze fell from his own, clouding completely now. He might have tried to speak, but it was interrupted by a wet, enervated cough. Blood escaped from between his lips in long, unending strands, and Thanos imagined how it must feel, how cold it must be to be strung along an alien shaft like a bloody glass bead. 

It would be Soul, Thanos thought, Soul and Power, fitting for a man such as this.

He closed his fist.

_ “Stop!” _

The voice came like it had been ripped free from chains of exhaustion, an order that couldn’t be ignored. Thanos paused, head turing infinitesimally toward the sorcerer who fought achingly, stubbornly, to get his hands beneath him. He was called Strange, Thanos remembered; powerful as well, enough to cast away the energy of the Stones with a wave of his hand.

But not powerful enough. 

“Spare his life,” Strange said, and it wasn’t a plea. It was a command. 

A bargain.

“And I will give you the Stone.”

Thanos looked at him fully, cocking his head in a calculating observance. The sorcerer didn’t balk, didn’t blink, not even when the blood on his temple slipped down below his brow and into one of his eyes. 

“No tricks?” Thanos rumbled.

Strange shook his head, exhaustion written in his shoulders and determination set in his jaw. He resolutely didn’t look at Stark.

Thanos swung the gauntlet toward Strange, gleaming with the power of all four Stones. It was a dare, a challenge, and Strange met it. He lifted a hand, one shaking like dead leaves in a winter storm, and between his forefinger and thumb, a light began to glow.

“Don’t,” Stark coughed. Still trying, still losing.  _ “Don’t.” _

Strange did look at him then. Just for an instant, less, his gaze landed gently on Stark’s face, full of emotion so complex and so simple that it was almost breathtaking. And it was a mistake, that glance, that instant, for though Stark didn’t see it, Thanos did.

_ Oh.  _

So it was this again. Another stonekeeper willing to die for the relic they held, but unable to kill the ones they loved for it.

The Time Stone manifested like a butterfly fluttering into existence, suspended between a sorcerer’s scarred hands. Thanos extended his own, tasting the potential, the promise its emerald light held. 

It tasted like cinnamon. 

 

**Earth-200004:** **_February 2017_ **

Thanos woke with a sharp, crackling energy, thrown from sleep by something inward instead of wrenched by something outward. He sat up, rolling his legs over the edge of his cot and took a breath. Another. 

Around him, the blue-green cast of his ship’s light edged at his fingers, his face, his knees. It pooled in the grooves of his gauntlet, lying as if nugatory on the small ledge beside his head. Thanos looked at it. His heartbeat, slowing in rhythm, seemed to pause—and for a moment, five Stones shone across the knuckles of the glove. They winked. 

Footsteps in the distance became a voice in his doorway; Thanos cocked his head. 

“Father?” prodded Ebony Maw. His deformed, expressionless face was twisted, and Thanos thought it could have been weariness or concern. 

Gamora had always been able to distinguish the Maw’s emotions. Thanos had never cared to. It wasn’t as though his child ever acted on them, nor contributed them, and expression did nothing to impact the power the Maw could weave. Why spend the time, truly?

“Greetings,” Thanos mumbled. He rubbed a hand across his face, trying to dispel the cloying images of his dream. 

“It is very early, your grandeur.” Maw’s hands were clasped before him, a symbol of compliance as well as the damper of his magic. 

“I realize,” Thanos said, pulling the hand from his face. He extended it to trail across the uru of his gauntlet, listening to the whispering clanks. 

A dream. Only a dream. 

But so clear, so crisp, like a reflection of a memory not yet experienced. Thanos could still smell blood, could still feel Titan’s wind, could still taste cinnamon. And it didn’t fade, not like a dream was supposed to, little trailing shadows that slipped through one’s fingers. It stuck; images and feelings, events and conversations. The feel of skin splitting. The attacks of a won battle. 

The words of a desperate sorcerer.

“Nightmare?” asked the Maw, still not advancing into the room. He knew better.

“No,” Thanos said slowly, shaking his head. “I don’t think so.”

He stood with a sweeping bound, one hand snatching the gauntlet and the other his helmet. The Maw inclined his head into a slithering bow as Thanos swept passed him with whirlwind energy. The titan’s narrowed eyes scanned the ship, scanned his own hands, his own memories.

Two Stones on Earth, three scattered, one unknown. But he’d had the gleam of Soul in that dream—that vision—on a planet not Terran. Orange before green, green before yellow. 

“Maw,” he said, pausing against the bay of the ship. Before him, the universe sparkled, a thousand worlds and a thousand people relying on him, waiting for him. 

“Yes, father?”

Thanos had been waiting, waiting for the last Stone to fall within reach before beginning his quest. The longer he fought, the higher the chance that he would be stopped. But, in a dream that felt more real than the world he saw around him now, he’d met Terrans on alien worlds, fought with a Soul Stone discovered first. Two Stones on Terra, one unknown. 

Perhaps his answers didn’t lie on Earth at all.

“Send scouts to the outer planets,” he ordered with orotund decisiveness. “Between Andromeda and Asgard, and near Morag.” 

“Yes, father,” the Maw purred. “What are we looking for? News of the Stones?”

The resolute brokenness of a sorcerer’s gaze. The shaking of scarred hands, wrapped in the embrace of a weakly twitching relic. The scream of a youth. The blood of another on Thanos’s hands—only the promise of his death enough to bring the Time Stone within Thanos’s grasp. The emerald light and the taste of cinnamon. 

“No,” Thanos rumbled. “Terrans.”

 

 

END OF PART TWO

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)


	99. No Longer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey so you remember the Stalk

 

PART THREE: YOU WERE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, GOLD PLATED, BUT WHAT'S INSIDE YOU?

 

 

 **Earth-199999:** **_May 2026_ **

 

Peter Parker was taking a survey. 

Not with words; he wasn’t brave enough for that. (This was the part where his therapist told him to add “yet”. Growth mindset and shit.) He was taking a survey of body language and conversation, a survey of glances and expressions, because that seemed to be the only way he could get a straight answer out of someone nowadays. 

He was twenty years old. He didn’t feel twenty years old. He felt like a child, still, like a kid who was just so damn confused because how could he come back to a world so completely broken? 

It wasn’t broken anymore, of course. Or maybe Peter was just numb to it.

He wasn’t going to college. (Not “yet”). He didn’t patrol as much, either. Instead, he swung out to the edges of the city and just walked, for hours on end, in great looping circles to see if he could find the edges of New York. He supposed he looked ridiculous, in his new, sparkling spider-suit, ignoring its capabilities and just strolling. It wasn’t something he particularly liked doing, nor something that he particularly disliked, but he did it ceaselessly.

He’d ignored a mugging last night. Just so that he could keep walking. 

(God. _God,_ what was wrong with him? He cared about that, he cared about them, he _had_ to. If he didn’t, what was there left for him?)

At least when he walked, there were more people to survey. Data, omniscient data—he could rely on that. It didn’t lie, it didn’t cheat, it didn’t change its mind. Peter needed something that didn’t right about now. 

The best data was statistical. The best data was diverse in those studied, with a wide base of understanding to eliminate bias. The best data gave a true answer. 

So Peter walked, and he talked, and he stayed silent, and in every step he asked New York his question. 

_Is this still my place?_

_(Do you still want me?)_

He really didn’t know what he wanted the answer to be. How much he wanted to be free. 

He blinked his eyes open with a sigh, pushing off from the filthy brick wall he’d leaned against. The outside of his suit was wet, and it gleamed in the rising late-night moonlight. Peter kept the heater on. The May air had a tendency to crawl down to his skin and into his bones, bones that always seemed to feel cold and heavy these days.

Peter just felt so heavy.

It wasn’t the same—nothing was the same. People called him by name beneath the mask, some still hesitant, some still angry. In the single job interview he’d went to since his graduation, the man who would have been his boss had been a fan; Peter had walked out before he’d answered the second question. He’d gotten halfway through the applications of dozens of colleges, grinding to a screeching halt each time he had to check a _‘I certify under penalty of law that the above information is true and complete to the best of my knowledge’_ box.

His resumes were garbage fires. His lists of accomplishments involved ‘not being dead’. There was a new checkbox underneath every form’s section for birthdays: _did you blip?_

 _A whole new world,_ Peter thought ruefully. He fiddled with his web shooters as he walked, the outskirt street mostly deserted. 

He wondered what MJ was doing right now. He wondered how Ned was doing at Rensselaer Polytech, which class he was studying for across the state as Peter walked. He wondered if Flash would answer a text if Peter sent one. He wondered if Morgan was asleep.

He wondered what the family in the lit window across the street was laughing about. He wondered where the few cars on the street were off to this late. 

He wondered what lives this new world lived. He wondered what life he lived. 

Taking his phone out of his pocket, Peter’s thumb hovered over the home button. The dark surface caught his reflection, the sleek lines of his mask and the shine of starlight battling with streetlamps. White eyes, emotionlessly impersonal, squinted back at him.

They were curved, edged like cat’s eyes. EDITH had square lenses. 

He’d given her to SHIELD, after they’d helped him back to New York. To what was left of SHIELD. 

What was left of him? 

He missed her, and he missed Karen. He should reactivate her—Karen was silent in this suit, though not by any fault of her own. She just… she’d been a symbol. And not the symbol Peter needed on that particularly bad day.

It wasn’t fair to her. She was a being, not just something to be manipulated.

And Peter still hadn’t reactivated her. Not after all these weeks. Not even because he didn’t want to, or because he was scared to; he just hadn’t _gotten around to it._

(Yet. _Yet yet yet yet—)_

His phone vibrated as he held it in his hand, and Peter looked back down. MJ was texting him—she tended to do that, nearing midnight or not.

 _‘Hey’,_ the text said. Just that.

Peter considered pretending not to see it, but decided he might as well reply. _‘Hey’_ he said. He climbed atop a nearby streetlight, settling down atop the flat shade on top, so he wouldn’t trip over anything or walk into the street when he wasn’t paying attention.

Before… everything, he’d been able to keep his surroundings in his mind at all times. He’d thought it one of his superpowers. But he’d lost that skill, left only with the constant coughing tingle of his spider-sense. 

 _‘Where are you?’_ MJ wondered. She never used abbreviations. Sometimes, she’d correct the improper uses of homophones or punctuation of “you’re” even in texts. Peter loved that about her. 

He loved so much about her. 

 _‘I don’t know,’_ he replied, wet fingers slipping on the keys.

_‘I’m tracking you over Maps. What are you doing over there by Inwood?’_

Peter looked around, watching the quaint little street over his knees. His legs swung unconsciously where they dangled, and the sharp corners of the street light dug into the backs of his thighs. _‘Just walking.’_

_‘Want dinner?’_

_‘It’s like one o’clock, MJ.’_

_‘We can have breakfast then.’_

Peter smiled, leaning over to brace his elbows on his legs. He pulled off his mask, tucking it under his knee, and scratched at the itch caused by the little loose panel on the inside of his visor. Another thing he should fix. 

_‘No, I’m not hungry.’_

_‘Yes you are.’_

Peter changed the subject. _‘Have you heard from Ned?’_

_‘Yeah. He says he has a web systems development final coming up.’_

_‘Oh oof.’_

_‘Yeah I told him.’_

_‘What about you? How’s it coming?’_

_‘Waiting on my financial aid package from Portland and Rice.’_

_‘Nice.’_ Peter swallowed down the anxious embarrassment that college talk—that _future_ talk—always pushed into his throat. He’d always thought he knew what his life was going to look like. He’d always thought…

(His therapist said he was still grieving. Said it’d be easier if he let go. He could do that, right? Pepper had, Happy had, May had. Even Morgan had, to her own extent.)

Life was mostly just scary, now. He felt more confused than ever, despite knowing more than ever before. 

Twenty years old and sitting on a streetlight at one in the morning. Spider-Man, Spider-Man.

_‘You don’t have to stay here, you know.’_

MJ’s contact photo was a black dahlia, photoshopped into a winter scene. Her contact photo for him was a doodle he’d done of a warped smiley-face.

_‘Where else would I go?’_

_‘SHIELD. Wakanda. MIT. I don’t know, Peter. Anywhere.’_

_‘That’s not who I am.’_

She didn’t reply. He saw her three dots pulse, as if she’d typed something, then thought better of sending it. 

 _(‘Then who are you?’_ He knew. He had to know, somewhere. Right?)

Peter closed his phone, palming it loosely and sighing. He was too tired for any of this. 

If he left now, he might be able to make it across the bridge from Manhattan by morning. Unathi might make brunch, if Peter called ahead. Or maybe he could bother May—no, she was staying with Happy this week. Maybe he could take MJ up on her offer for early breakfast. Or text Flash, the last of his classmates still in New York, as far as Peter knew.

Or he could go back to the apartment. 

(And do what? Nothing. Nothing at all, always nothing at all.)

He didn’t want to, though. He’d have to make food before he went to bed, and there weren’t any groceries. He should get some before May came back…

Peter opened his phone, then closed it again. Opened it.

He clicked out of MJ’s conversation, swiping haphazardly through his collection of chats. One day he might organize them; the ones at the bottom were from _years_ ago. Squinting at a couple of the numbers, Peter wondered who he’d known back then. Who he knew now. 

There was one from the library district, a missed call about an overdue hold. There was one from the school principle. One from a scam network he hadn’t gotten rid of yet. A couple of Microsoft Verification texts, too, and—

Oh. 

Peter’s finger paused where it had fallen, fingernail underlining the contact name. So near the bottom, lost in the spam and the forgotten communications. 

_Doctor Wizard. Last contacted 2/10/2026._

That had been months ago, a fleeting voicemail when he’d been lonely. Peter couldn’t even remember what he’d said. Three months since he’d tried to find the doctor, and more than two _years_ since he’d last seen him.

Two long, broken, life-changing years.

Peter didn’t know what Strange was a symbol for, anymore.

The light of the streetlight didn’t quite reach him where he was perched atop it. It lit in gold the parts of him usually in shadow. Peter shivered as the wind picked up ever-so-slightly, hunching over around himself. His finger didn’t move from the screen.

Strange had so many futures, where Peter couldn’t find a single one. Maybe… maybe the wizard, his _friend,_ would know what to do.

(What’s the harm, really?) 

Peter tapped the icon. 

He remembered so well the way it shifted to the navy background, ringing long within his hands. He knew exactly how much further he fell into resignation with each tone of the call. Strange wouldn’t pick up, Peter knew, he never had, and he raised the phone to his ear and waited. Maybe he wouldn’t leave a message this time.

He’d had enough leaving messages for people that wouldn’t hear them, that never responded to them. 

(Fifteen years old and so eager. How pathetic was that?)

“Hello?”

Peter blinked.

The cold turned sharper, the light turned brighter, the sounds of the cars on the streets around him turned to roars. 

 _“Stephen?”_ Peter yelped. The first name came before he could think, and he hardly noticed as it slipped off his tongue. 

“I—fuck.” 

And then the doctor hung up.

Peter barely kept from hurling his phone at the nearest building, a toxic, explosive mix of fury and frustration and _utter, complete relief_ surging through every one of his thoughts. Doctor Strange was back. Doctor Strange was _alive_. Doctor Strange had spoken to him—and then he’d run. 

“Oh no you don’t, you old warlock!” Peter hissed.

And for the first time in far too many days, far too many weeks, Peter pressed his fingers to his web shooters and lept into the sky.  

  
  


117A Bleecker Street was darkened and sleepy as Peter arrived, puffing, on its doorstep. The door practically shouted _unwelcome_ and the great circular window—the seal of whoever—only reflected back the light around it, revealing nothing. None of it slowed Peter down. He took a great, gulping breath of air, took off his mask, and _hammered_ on the door.

 _“Hello?”_ he called, hoping the building could hear. “Let me in, you idiot, and tell me what the _fuck_ is happen—!”

The door opened before he could finish his sentence to a sharp-faced woman holding a whip of golden energy. Peter practically stumbled into her. She had angular features and hair as fiery as anything Peter had ever seen, and her expression twisted between aggression and confusion as she saw him.

And she wore robes. Navy robes, clean and familiar in that declaration of sorcerer rank. She wore robes like Doctor Strange. 

They gaped at each other for a long moment, and Peter searched for a question that would cover everything he needed to ask. But it was as if some magic had stolen his words along with his expectations. 

“What are you doing here?” the woman finally asked, lifting her hand. The whip fizzled, morphing into a long, sharp blade of dripping light. 

“I—I’m looking—who _are_ you?” Peter yelped.

“I’m a sorcerer, kid.”

“Yeah, I know that.” Peter pulled off his mask—it wasn’t like she didn’t already know who he was, calling him a child. “A Mystic Artist, all that. But what are you doing in the Sanctum?”

The woman’s brows knit, staring at Peter with new eyes. He stared back. 

“I’m the Master of this Sanctum,” she said slowly.

Peter blinked. 

Then he blinked again, rising up onto his toes to peer behind her. The foyer was light, warm from the gentle flames in the hearth, and the stairway curled away… differently than Peter was used to. Everything was different. It was like the entire building had been forcibly rearranged, rewritten around the seal above him. 

“But…” Peter swallowed. “What about Doctor Strange?”

In an instant, the woman’s face had hardened. “Strange is no a longer Master in our Order,” she snapped. “And it’s time for you to leave.”

Peter ignored her. “Why?” he demanded. “Where is he? Is he okay, is he—no, he’s okay, he answered me.” _He has to be. You can’t make me—make me hope and then dash it, not again._ “Can I see him? Please?”

The woman’s face didn’t change, her sword only twitching slightly closer to Peter’s neck. He didn’t flinch. 

“He isn’t here.” She was almost snarling. 

“No. He is, don’t _lie to me,”_ Peter hissed right back. “You don’t understand, I thought he was _dead._ Two years, _two years_ I thought he was gone and none of you would tell me why, I thought he—I thought he’d left me too.”

The woman—the _Master of the New York Sanctum—_ looked unimpressed. They stood there, face to face with magic between them, in the nighttime glare of Greenwich Village. 

“He isn’t dead. And he isn’t here.”

“Why? Did you kick him out?” His mind clawed at the thought.

“Unfortunately not.”

“Then I can find him from here,” Peter said confidently. He tried to shove passed the woman into the alien Sanctum, seeking the lick of familiar energy he could sense from within. It was still the building he knew, he was sure of it, he just had to—

His throat burned with outside warmth. Peter froze. The sword had risen, pressed coolly against his neck, and the woman held her arm fully extended. The Sanctum groaned. 

“Leave.” The woman said simply. Peter’s swallow bobbed against the blade. “You aren’t welcome here.”

The words stole Peter’s breath from his lungs, stole his heart down into the depths of his gut. No, _no._ She was wrong. She didn’t understand. 

(The Sanctum had hugged him, all those years ago. Had warmed him beside its fire and given him luck at cards, had been the sanctuary its name promised from the chaos outside. Had been home, in its own broken way.)

“You aren’t welcome here, Spider-Man,” the Master said again, forcing Peter back a few steps. The Sanctum groaned again. “Go. Now.”

But it was a third voice, a voice strong atop its endless layers of exhaustion that called, “No.”

Peter looked up, eyes wide, faster than he’d moved since his return, faster than he’d moved perhaps ever. Doctor Strange stood on the stairway, a hand—unusually bare—resting on the railing. He looked strange, he looked _wrong,_ clad in a loose t-shirt that had probably been white once in its threadbare life, his usually sharp appearance and expression dull around the edges. He’d looked so powerful and self-assured within the colors of his Order. Now, though… 

The Master turned, expression twisting, but the sword had fallen away from Peter’s throat. He moved in an instant, ducking beneath her arm and surging into the Sanctum. 

A yelp from behind him, but that didn’t matter; all that mattered was the tired smile on Doctor Strange’s face. Peter watched him try to contain it, to staunch the expression before it broke across his face, and fail.

He flew up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and stopped one below where the sorcerer (?) was lingering. Peter shook his head at him, staring. He hoped Strange could read every one of his turbulent emotions, all his fury and relief and joy, across his form. 

“Apologies,” the doctor said, but not to him. He inclined his head toward the woman in the doorway slightly, in that way the novices and even, occasionally, Wong, had done to him. Peter felt the urge to gape. 

“What are you doing here, Strange?” the Master demanded. “What is _he_ doing here?”

“Peter Parker will always be welcome here,” Strange explained quietly. He hadn’t looked back at Peter, not yet. “Not by my order, just as it cannot be refused by yours. Did you not hear the Sanctum?”

The woman glowered in that way that meant more than a breech of authority, more than a ‘lesser’ sorcerer stepping out of line. This was personal, to her.

Peter looked at Strange’s expressionless, unwavering gaze and swallowed. What had _happened_ to him? 

“I heard it,” the woman admitted. “But the wards will bend to my authority.”

“Probably. A good Master does listen to the Sanctum she runs, however.”

“Are you questioning me?”

Strange didn’t flinch. “Of course not, Maura. I simply don’t want the bathroom to move itself in the middle of the night.”

“Shouldn’t you be in Kamar-Taj?”

“Yes.” Strange’s hand slipped off the railing. “But I accidentally answered a phone call.”

He finally looked at Peter, taking him in in a single, all-encompassing glance. That small, involuntary smile remained, and Peter thought it looked unpracticed. Like Strange’s face couldn’t quite remember what happiness looked like. 

“Why did you hang up?” Peter hissed. He didn’t want the woman, Maura, to hear the question. 

“I’ll explain,” Strange replied, equally as quietly. To Maura, he said, “again, my apologies. I will leave you to your duties.”

Again, he offered that whisper of a bow. Peter raised an eyebrow.

And before the Master could protest or issue another order, he gripped Peter’s wrist with a shaking hand and ran.

Peter yelped, pulled into motion, until he was side-by-side with Strange, racing through the halls of the Sanctum. The further they got from the foyer, the more Peter recognized. He began to recognize the decore, the cracks in the glass, the knots of the wood. 

Strange slowed when he determined them suitably lost within the bowels of the building. Leaning against the nearest wall, he drew a panting breath, then released Peter’s wrist.

“Hi,” he said.

Peter slapped him. 

“Ow?"

“What the _fuck_ you _fucking hobo wizard!”_ Peter waved his arms, doing his best impression of a windmill. “How could you—what did you—where have you _been?”_

“I dropped out of time for two years.”

“Exactly! I couldn’t contact you, and Wong wouldn’t tell me anything, and Pepper couldn’t find you, and it—it was like you were _dead,_ Strange! Where were you?”

Strange raised his eyebrow, peering at Peter above gaunt cheeks. “Really, Peter. I dropped out of time.”

Peter opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. 

“It—a spell went wrong. One I wasn’t supposed to be using.” The words were careful, secretive. “And it sent me forward a few years.”

“Oh.” Peter swallowed. “So you… you don’t know…”

“I got your voicemails,” Strange said. “I’m so sorry.”

Peter felt like crying. He felt like curling up around himself in the corner of this hallway and sobbing, like a child. Pitiful. 

“I—I don’t—”

“Hey.” Strange put a hand on his shoulder, and Peter leaned into it slightly. “It’s okay.”

“No.” It was the only word Peter could manage. Strange’s smile turned vacant.

“It’s not. But it’s going to be.”

Peter sniffed, feeling so tiny as he watched the tall wizard stand straight. Strange’s fingers curled on his shoulder. 

“How old are you now?” the wizard wondered.

“Twenty.”

Strange snorted. “No you’re not. You can’t be. That makes me… old. Way too old!”

Peter allowed himself a grin. “Sorry man. You’re ancient now. Ancient as…” Peter trailed off, something snapping into place in his mind. Stupidly, obviously, he peered behind Strange to the empty space on his shoulders.

“Where…” he began. “Where’s the Cloak?”

In a flash, everything in Strange’s expression crumpled. It was just a moment, a moment of desolated loneliness, before icy defensiveness slammed down into its place. His hand fell from Peter’s shoulder.

“Upstairs.” He looked away. “In the relic room.”

Though the words weren’t unexpected, it could not have been more obvious that something was wrong. It was Peter’s turn to reach out, this time. 

“Doctor Strange. Why… who’s that woman? She called herself the Master of this Sanctum. That can’t be right. Can it?”

Strange smiled, something rueful and dark. “It is correct. I’m no longer a Master. No longer a sorcerer, clinging to the edge of the Order. And relics… only those accepted here deserve those.”

 Oh. _Oh._

_‘A spell went wrong. One I wasn’t supposed to be using.’_

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.”

“No, maybe not.” Peter moved forward, leaning into Strange’s side. He could feel the man’s bones through hollowed, pale skin. "But I can be sorry all the same.”

They stood like that, for a long while, cold and broken and lonely in the heart of this building that couldn't truly be theirs any longer. They stood, lonely together, and Peter felt like he couldn't breathe. Not because he was sad, though. Not because... he didn't know how he felt. 

Lonely together. Sharing warmth on a cold May midnight. 

"Do you want to play cribbage?"

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That hurt me so now you have to be hurt too. Only fair.


	100. Another World First

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> C H A P T E R 1 0 0 
> 
> That's a world first for me! XD. I feel like I should do a little dance or something. Three digit number! Centennial celebration! Aaaa! 
> 
> Unfortunately this chap isn't super dramatic or anything. But oh well! Onwards and upwards. Enjoy. :)

 

**Earth-200004:** **_January 2017_ **

 

It was strange, how much difference a location could make from way up here.

Tony had imagined this, this exact, hanging moment where their spaceship made orbit. He knew that feeling. Like the pause at the apex of an arc, the  _ Beyond  _ seemed motionless in the silent section before they broke the pull of gravity. Balanced in the hold of a quantum string, the hum of the ship was almost a purr. 

And there, outside the quartz glass, was the Earth. 

It shone beneath their sun’s stare as the Eastern Hemisphere turned away from the light. When Tony had thought of himself gazing out this window, he’d unconsciously imagined the curve of the East Coast, the loop of the Florida panhandle, the sparkle of the Great Lakes. Instead, he was trailing into nothingness above the concave coast of Africa. He watched the swaths of tawny earth and the emerald vegetation throughout. The thick stripe of green across the landmass brought Tony’s eyes to the horizon, to the glowing pinpricks of human life nestled against coasts and within mountains. 

It was strange how  _ different  _ it felt. 

He’d never seen the world like this. Not from up here, not truly; he’d seen it in visions of destruction, he’d seen the space of other worlds, but never his own. It’s true vulnerability was so obvious where he hung above it all. 

An ornament on a tree, bright against darkness. A marble against the void. Tony reached out, fingers brushing the glass, as if he could hold it in his hands. Protect it. 

“Precious only endless world in which you say you live,” murmured a low voice beside him. Tony let his gaze slid over to where Strange stood, head slightly cocked. The Earth shone double in the sorcerer’s eyes. 

“Robert Graves?” 

Strange nodded. “Mm.”

“Greatest, rareness, muchness, fewness,” Tony agreed. He leaned against the control panel, tapping away the hinged screens so they pivoted from his approach. “FRIDAY, you’re photographing this, I hope?”

“Filming, boss.”

“Good.”

FRIDAY’s code, wrapped inseparably around the control networks for their ship, was a completely independent system than the FRIDAY that ran within the compound. Technically, two sets of code could run at once, but Tony hardly considered duplicating his girl. He would have two entirely new FRIDAYs by the end of it. So he’d left JOCASTA running the Compound, instead, to somewhat selfishly have FRIDAY up here to keep him grounded.

Their acceleration was gradual, but he could still perceive it as they plunged away from the Earth. The warp-core had yet to kick in for it’s second burst of power, which would be enough to slingshot them around the moon in the precise angle of Asgard. 

_ Let the road trip begin. _

Tony leaned his forehead against the glass, still too awed to really focus on those around him. He thought the rest of the crew might be with him, spread variously throughout the cockpit. They weren’t visible in his peripheral, however, so he wouldn’t know. 

Somehow, all he considered as he blasted away from everything he’d ever known was how beautiful the atmosphere was. How beautiful it all was. 

When the Earth was gone and the vacuum had taken hold, Tony doubted it would look so beautiful. But that was the future. Right now, Tony felt weightless, his thoughts just drifting in this time and no where else. And right now, what he saw was stunning. 

“Another record broken,” someone breathed. Tony thought it was Natasha. 

“Another world first.” 

From somewhere to his left, Loki huffed. “You people are so dramatic. It is simply your Earth from above. Have you not witnessed such before?”

“Loki, don’t ruin the moment,” Tony scolded. Loki huffed louder. Tony added, “we have seen it, but not… not like this. Not in person. You have to admit, it’s really something to behold.”

Loki was silent, and Tony blinked away from the globe to observe him. A slight frown had twisted the Asgardian’s face, and his gaze didn’t flicker as he peered at the retreating Earth. The artificial gravity was slightly weaker than a perfect Earthen weight. Loki’s hair drifted slightly in reflection. 

“It is,” Loki said after a moment. “It would be, for you. I remember when I first saw Asgard like this. The blue and the gold and the white… yes, flight is something wonderful.”

“Hm.” Tony grunted. Looking away, he decided someone had to introduce Loki to Robert Graves.

There was no question as to who that someone would inevitably be. Which was what had Tony finally— _ finally— _ turning around to look behind him to where he’d last seen Peter. The lack of verballity coming from the kid’s direction was a bit strange, but Tony had figured he was as star-struck as the rest of them. After all, the boy had always seemed to love space, and the ships that could take him within it. 

That was part of it, Tony saw as he suddenly zeroed in on Peter’s expression. But so far from all of it.

Peter was watching the Earth with more than excitement, more than awe. He watched it with confusion, with loss and loneliness and hesitance. Arms hugged his sides, his entire demeanor brought him closer to the far wall, to the floor. He looked small, young. His brows were furrowed close to his eyes, and he was biting his bottom lip. Hard. 

Tony was at his side in an instant. No one noticed, except perhaps Rogers, though Tony didn’t acknowledge it. He leaned against the wall next to Peter, unconsciously mimicking the kid’s posture.

“Pete,” he said. It wasn’t a prompt, nor was it a question. Tony simply called attention to himself.  _ I’m here.  _

Peter didn’t answer, though he did raise a finger in what could have been a wave. His other hand came up to rub his shoulder, his chin, his lips. 

Something had happened. What had happened? Tony had only let the kid out of his sight for  _ six seconds.  _

“One small step for spider,” Tony began, a bit awkwardly, “one giant leap for spider-kind.”

That got him a huff. “That wasn’t actually supposed to be the quote, you know?” Peter told him with distracted quietness. “Mr. Armstrong was supposed to say ‘one small step for  _ a  _ man, one giant leap for mankind.’ It makes more grammatical sense that way.”

Tony was surprised to find he actually hadn’t known that, though the kid was decidedly correct. It did make more sense. “Huh. Well, way to devalue a historical, iconic quote. Where’d you find that out?”

Peter’s frown flickered. “MJ told me.”

There: the half-blink of Peter’s eyes, the tremble at his throat, the hesitance in his voice. Something was wrong. Something was hurting, and some almost primal desire was pushing Tony to make it stop.

“She’s a smart girl,” Tony said, and this time he was probing. 

“Yeah.” Another tremble, another pause, another blink. 

_ The girl.  _ The girl, of course the girl, the girl you never saw, never  _ observed  _ until you’d already made your choice. The girl who made you think you’d chosen wrong, just for a moment. The girl, the aunt, the friend, the  _ life  _ left behind.

Tony put his hand on Peter’s shoulder and squeezed. The Earth fit entirely in their viewport, now. 

“Come with me,” Tony said, and quietly lead the boy into the heart of the  _ Beyond.  _

Peter followed him doggidly, as if unwilling to come, but with no reason to linger, either. He didn’t seem adverse to leaving the view. Some part of Tony mourned that. The moment of liftoff, this life-changing, one-time observation, was here, and Peter wasn’t in the mindset to truly appreciate it. 

It was terrible that he was missing it.

But that wasn’t what was important here. Not now. Tony found a hollow in the chamber bay, fitted with another huge window. It faced the front of the ship, toward the moon and the journey beyond.

“Okay,” Tony said finally, spinning to face Peter. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Peter said weakly.

“Buuuullshit,” sang Tony. “I know you’re sad, kid.”

“I’m not sad.”

“Lies.” Tony sighed. “Listen, I get it, okay? If it is what I think it is… then I understand.”

“Do you?” The words were bitter, but not because of Tony. 

Tony smiled, fighting the urge to take the kid’s shoulder again. “I do. Perhaps better than most everyone—”  _ all but one ninety-year-old man. He knows far better—  _ “on this ship. It’s the girl, isn’t it.”

“It’s not, it’s— _ yes,”  _ Peter sighed, “yes, it’s totally MJ, she’s—she—I’m such an  _ idiot,  _ Mr. Stark! How could I not realize?”

“Realize what?” Tony thought he knew, but he wanted the kid to say it. 

“That she—that she—” Peter touched his face again. “That she loves me,” he finished in a whisper.  

“Oh, Underoos.” Tony folded the boy into his arm again, half hugging him, half holding him up. “You can be quite dumb sometimes. All the time. Don’t stress, that’s gotta be why she likes you. Loves you.”

“Not helping, Mr. Stark,” Peter groaned. 

Tony chuckled, patting the kid’s side. The glass was cool against their back; a substantial siphoning of their power went to the heating of the machine, though the insulation was near-perfect in its energy efficiency. Another wonder of the alloys one could make with vibranium. 

“What happened?” Tony asked. “Did she…”

“She kissed me, yeah.” Peter fidgeted. Tony could  _ hear  _ him blushing. “Right… right in the middle of the gangplank. Right in front of the whole lab, and then she just  _ left,  _ and I did too… what else was I supposed to do?”

He looked up at Tony, eyes wide and young and desperate. 

“You did nothing wrong,” Tony assured. “Those moments seem like they should last for ever. But sometimes, breaking them is all you  _ can  _ do.”

“I don’t even know…” Peter took a shaking breath. “I don’t even know how I feel yet. I didn’t have  _ time  _ to know, after she… yeah. Isn’t it supposed to make sense now?”

Tony grunted. “Who told you those lies, kid? It never makes any sense. All the things they say in books and whatever? Completely false.”

Peter hummed, as though he hadn’t really heard him. “I’ve kissed a girl before.”

Tony blinked. “Really?”

“Well, she kissed me. We were… we’d just won decathalon.” Peter waved his hands, looking like some sort of deep-sea squid.

“Did you like it?”

“Yes?”

“Did you like this?”

“Yes. No! I don’t—I don’t know!” Peter ground his teeth, pressing his head against his palms. “I… after Liz left, I never even considered… I didn’t ever think like that! I mean, yeah MJ’s scary and smart as hell and fucking gorgeous, but—”

“Peter…”

“But I never—” Peter cut himself off, throwing his arms into the air in frustration as the words seemed to skate away from him. “I just—”

“You were saving the world.” Tony tightened his hold.

“Yeah.”

Tony blinked, strawberry-blonde hair and a tall form and high heels flashing across his vision, just for a moment. “And you couldn’t wait. You never even thought to wait.”

“Yeah.” Peter’s voice trembled. 

Tony had tried to wait, once. He’d tried to choose, to choose her and to choose the life she wanted with him, and then came SHIELD and Ultron and Sokovia and Tony just… couldn’t. He didn’t blame himself, not for that, and he didn’t blame Pepper for pausing, for trying to wait for him to understand himself. 

In the Stalk, it seemed he had. He’d learned to make a different sacrifice; a sacrifice of responsibility. 

But here, he’d fastened an arc reactor to his chest. Here, he flew into the abyss of the universe, far away from her. Here, he was Iron Man, without understanding of the man beneath it. 

And there… there she was with someone else.

“It’s okay,” Tony began slowly, “to be torn, you know. It doesn't have to be clear. And just because it isn’t doesn’t mean your feelings, one way or the other, are lesser or wrong.”

“What feelings? I don’t have—I don’t know what they are!”

“That’s okay, too.”

Peter growled, burring his face in Tony’s elbow and clenching fists that had fallen to his sides. “But it feels  _ awful,  _ Mr. Stark. It’s not supposed to feel awful. Is it?”

Tony shrugged. “ _ She  _ isn’t supposed to feel awful. The circumstances though…” he sighed. “This universe doesn’t tend to make things easy for us, kid.”  

“Why does it have to be all or nothing?  _ Why?” _

“It’s not.” Tony ruffled the somewhat sweaty curls over the sliver of Peter’s forehead still visible. “It can sometimes feel like it, but if… if you figure it out, if you find the balance, it doesn’t have to be. You can have life  _ and  _ work. Love  _ and  _ purpose. It just takes time. And effort; a  _ lot  _ of effort.”

“Can you teach me?” Peter looked up at him, edging outward a little to better fix Tony in his gaze. 

“Me?” Tony laughed. “I can certainly try. But I don’t have it figured out either, kid. None of us do.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

Silence, after that, stretching forward and winding between them. It was tinged with awkwardness, but not intolerably. Tony didn’t break it. Instead, he watched as Peter rubbed his eyes with his hands and took a deep breath, blowing it out in a sigh, and raised his chin. 

“At least there’s a benefit to the worst timing ever,” he said.

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Oh?”

“Hurtling away on a spaceship, never to return in the same way I left, definitely means I don’t have to figure it out right now.”

Tony chuckled. “There is that.”

_ You’ve got time, kid. You’ve got all the time in the world. _

* * *

For his first day away from Earth, Peter wasn’t thinking much about space.

No, as the day stretched on and the Earth became second to the moon, as both turned to nothing but distant pinpricks of darkness before the sun, Peter thought about a table in a high school cafeteria and the stars he saw from beneath.

Now he was within those same stars. 

He hadn’t seen the stars that lay on Earth, and now he was all but blinded in their absence. Clinquant, unfathomable: Peter missed them, as much as he adored the new horizons before him. 

Was it selfish, to wish he could have both?

Peter tapped his fingers against the quartz-glass, his knees curled up to his chest. His quarters in the spaceship were small by Tony’s standards, he was sure, but were truly plenty comfortable; only about half the size of his room at home. He’d been gifted a round window, set into the wall to give him a place to sit before it, and a row of shelves for the possessions he’d brought from Earth. The bed was tucked into the wall. Peter had yet to test its comfort, but he didn’t have any doubts he’d get used to it. 

Maybe he’d just sleep here, in this window, watching the universe. 

A single day in space, and he was already homesick. Peter smiled ruefully. 

_ Thanks, Jones.  _

He could still feel her warmth, lingering in that phantom way a memory did when it wouldn’t rest. She’d kissed him—Michelle Jones had actually kissed  _ him,  _ Peter Parker, in the moment he could do nothing in return. 

How impossible was that? Their fire-cracker decathlon captain, their fearless pioneer, their genius innovation, their unflappable storyteller. Kissing  _ him.  _

It hadn’t felt like kissing Liz. Liz had… she’d surprised him, overwhelmed him, scorched him, and it had been warm and light and utterly breathtaking. It had been all the suspense of the competition, all the satisfaction of winning. Peter still felt his stomach twist, remembering it.

But MJ? She’d shocked him too, unquestionably, sent him rocking all the way down through his heels and back up before he could blink. MJ had kissed him lightly, cooly, easily, and Peter had kissed her back. He thought he could remember color, even though his eyes had slipped closed. He thought he could remember blue, and pink, and green. He could definitely remember confusion, helplessness, hypersensitivity—but not fear. He hadn’t been afraid. 

“How about that, then?” Peter breathed, leaning his head against the glass. “What am I supposed to make of it?”

Outside, the void didn’t answer.

Inside, Peter’s heart did. 

  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Space. The final frontier.   
> Nevermind
> 
>  
> 
> Thanks for reading!


	101. The First Day Ended

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm late I know. But I made it! Enjoy. <3

 

**Earth-200004:** **_February 2017_ **

 

The first day in space was like nothing Tony had ever experienced. There was so much to see, so much to take in, so many routines to establish and understandings to build. He pulled up navigations, familiarized himself with real-world data flowing through their sensors, tracked the use of power, and reworked every expectation he could ever have created. The  _ Beyond  _ proved them all systematically wrong.

And then the first day ended, and the second began. And the second day became the third, became the first week, the first two. 

And space became a lot less memorable. 

They were traveling about half the speed of light, and all that greeted them was nothing. Nothingness outside their windows, nothingness on the monitors, nothingness. Tony’d expected this, of course; space wasn’t called ‘space’ for no reason, but it was still a transition he was in the midst of. Once they reached lightspeed and above, the view would become something all the stranger as they traveled faster than the view could even reach their eyes. 

But that was then, and this was now. Now, Tony was occupied by a fat lot of  _ nothing.  _

“I’m bored,” he announced to the empty cockpit. 

“Yes boss, you’ve said,” FRIDAY replied. Even the AI sounded disinterested. With only one vessel to manage, she’d been greatly downsized in the last couple of weeks, despite the influx of alien data. 

“Didn’t I put anything interesting on this spaceship?”

“It’s a  _ spaceship,  _ boss.”

“Pft. Lame. Building it was so much better than this.”

FRIDAY gave him her version of a sigh. She’d had to adapt; yesterday, Tony had pettily edited the sigh sound effect from her code because she’d been huffing at everything he said. Sometimes a man just wanted to complain to his AI  _ without  _ the sarcastic backtalk. Now, though, she’d calculated the proper way to warp the power in order to make the computers whirr to the frequency of her sigh. 

_ Fine, I surrender, I’ll give you your voice back.  _

“You implemented many regions of entertainment, boss,” FRIDAY said. “A workshop. A training center. A communal area—”

“You don’t need to list them to me, FRI,” Tony huffed. He’d be in the workshop at this moment if he trusted anyone else to watch and manage the cockpit while he was gone. Teaching Peter, or maybe Strange, would be possible. If nothing changed in this repetitive cycle of moments, he might end up resorting to that…

Or maybe Natasha. If he was really desperate. 

By some celestial mercy, even in the close quarters of the  _ Beyond,  _ he’d managed to avoid too much interaction with people outside of Peter. Loki, unfortunately, was growing on him, purely for the reason that he didn’t hide the fact that he was avoiding Tony. Not for any personal reason, Tony didn’t think; the god just preferred solitude—and Peter—far more than any company the rest of them could provide. 

As for Natasha—and Steve—they occasionally ended up in the same room, and they spoke directly when Tony gave updates each night. Day. Sleep-cycle. Whatever. Otherwise, though, the rogues might as well have been still on Earth. 

Strange was being himself, as far as Tony could tell. The wizard had done his best phantom impression for the first week, seemingly familiarizing himself with the  _ Beyond  _ and their new environment. Tony had never caught him without his new jewelry, and though he suspected what it contained, he never asked. Now, though, the wizard had grown far more comfortable. He didn’t seek out their crew, but neither did he avoid them. 

Generally, Tony was less than impressed with the company he was keeping. 

“Oh well,” Tony sighed, crossing his legs on the shelving unit before him. “I’m sure I’ll be thankful when we finally get a bit of action around here.”

He was curious as to the skills of his new allies, yes, but even more interested in the technique of Steve and Natasha. Before, he’d known their styles like he knew his own, able to predict and read and work in easy, familiar tandem. He wondered if they’d changed. He wondered how much. He wondered if they were in the training room right now, sparring in the tingling air and the artificial gravity. 

The ship would be fine for a few moments, really, if he wanted to go somewhere. Do something, anything. He could disorganize the workshop to his liking. Check in with the others, see what Peter was up to. 

He could check the training center. He could stay there.

Tony crossed his legs, still propped before him, and got comfortable where he was.

* * *

 Loki had never been on a spaceship quite like this. 

The ones he was used to were vehicles; modes of transport to take an individual between locations. They were small and comfortable with no more than three areas, and no facilities that could even compare to the  _ Beyond.  _ This ship was a  _ residence.  _ Loki had never even considered that their ship would need waste processing, or a mess hall, or a workshop, or even  _ living quarters.  _ It made sense, of course, but he’d never imagined spaceships possessing these things. 

The  _ Beyond,  _ he figured as he scaled the curling hallway toward the lead cockpit, deserved a title far beyond spaceship. It was an entire world contained within unbreachable walls. A place one wouldn’t step outside of for months on end was far more than transport. It was a home. 

Loki extended a hand, trailing along the nearest wall of the ship. He enjoyed walking through the circular, trailing tail because the curl was so exaggerated that he could sense its curve. The artificial gravity pulled to the centroid of the  _ Beyond,  _ so Loki felt as though he was scaling the surface of an entire planet every time he moved between two halves of the ship. 

As he traveled, he sorted the separate facilities and areas he passed. The living quarters extended into the flat, slightly curved wing-like appendages of the vessel, with Loki, Rogers, and Strange on the left and Peter, Stark, and Romanoff on the right. Atop the hallway—both beside and beneath the living quarters, due to the strange gravitational pull—was the training and exercise hall. Peter had told him the origins of the instruments within; how, without gravity, Earthen 'astronauts’ could be physically harmed by lack of movement. 

Near the front of the ship, where he was headed, was the control center; the largest part of the ship by far. The place served as both cockpit and gathering area, becoming the communal space that all the crew could occupy when necessary. They stored the Mind Stone and the Time Gem within it, separate and contained and hidden and safe. The cockpit was almost entirely windows, populated by wires, computers, and a mad scientist with an affinity for sarcasm. 

Around the thin edge of the ship’s ‘tail’ were the hygiene facilities. Toilets and showers and all sources of water were found in that area. There was a small restroom near the cockpit in case of emergency, but otherwise, they kept the facilities as close to the recycling unit as possible to conserve power. Also in that area was their tiny kitchen and the rations that accompanied it.

Loki  _ hated  _ the rations. And the kitchen, by extension. Other parts of spaceship living were tolerable, but the fact that he actively dreaded consuming each meal was something ni-unbearable. 

He was fleeing from lunch currently, in fact. Peter would inevitably notice and drag some re-hydrated food up to him, but Loki could delay the moment for a few minutes longer. 

FRIDAY hummed when he entered the cockpit. The noise was mostly to alert Stark to his entrance, Loki was sure, but it served as a welcome greeting as well. Loki hummed back, matching the AI’s tone and mood.

“Why, if it isn’t the Rock of Ages,” Stark announced, spreading his arms wide. He was sprawled across a chair and half of a table, nearly horizontal in stance, and he didn’t look at Loki when he entered. That would have been too much effort.

“I still do not understand of what you speak,” Loki pointed out, sidling over to the what Peter and he had started calling the ship’s ‘visor’; the large window that spread across the whole of the cockpit. 

“Good,” Stark replied. 

Loki huffed, hand reaching into a pocket to tap at the edges of his StarkPhone. The object had lost much capability, now that it was separated from Earth, but it still gave his relative location and direction from the others attached to the network Stark had wired the ship with. It also allowed him to take photos. 

Loki had been taking a lot of photos. Most of them were blurry images of crew members looking confused. 

“What are you doing here?” Stark wondered, finally flopping his head over the edge of the seat to look at Loki.

“Seeking the view,” Loki lied. There was no point to the falsehood, but no point to truth, either. 

“Lunch?”

“Disgusting.”

“Hooray,” Stark sighed. “I think I’ll just stay here, then.”

Loki wasn’t sure if Stark had ever left the cockpit—not for extended periods of time, at least. He would converse with Peter, verbally spar with Strange, and even poke at Loki occasionally, but this room had become his lair.

Loki was thankful for it. For some inexplicable reason, he felt safe knowing Stark was the mind of the  _ Beyond.  _

“What do you do?” the engineer asked. “During the day, I mean.”

Loki shrugged. “Fight. Shift. Explore. Plot. No different than I would on Earth.”

“Glad to hear it. Should I be afraid?”

“Only if you dislike snakes.”

Stark blinked at him, as though he wasn’t quite sure if Loki was joking or not. Loki just smiled saccharinely and sat, making himself comfortable in one of the many variations of chairs. 

“The boss is bored,” FRIDAY told him. Stark nodded emphatically.

“ _ So bored,”  _ he stressed. “I’m almost wishing for a crisis at this point.”

“That can be arranged.”

“Loki, no.”

Loki huffed, sitting back into his seat with a frown. “I’m bored as well,” he protested. “Are you certain you don’t want me to assist?”  
“Your definition of _‘assist’_ is extremely questionable.”

Loki nodded. “Thank you.”

Rolling his eyes, Stark pulled his feet down from the table before him and spun in his chair. He faced Loki with calculating eyes. They blinked at each other for a moment.

“You know,” Stark hummed, “you’re rather puzzling.”

“And you’re just full of compliments today,” Loki purred. He clasped his fingers before him and leaned against his knees.

Grinning, Stark lifted his hands as though gesturing for applause. “Always, my Asgardian acquaintance.”

“Lovely. But do explain what is so puzzling about me.”

Stark shrugged. “I’m still occasionally surprised by the fact that you don’t want to kill me.”

“Oh, I occasionally consider it.”

Stark laughed, saying, “oh, me too, rest assured. But I’m surprised by the fact that you aren’t  _ trying.  _ It wasn’t that long ago that I would have killed you on sight, and now here we are, in this spaceship that has unwillingly become our home, sitting incorrectly on chairs.”

Loki hummed dispassionately. He’d long since stopped being shocked by these things. One could never tell what lay in one’s future, or what lay beneath the skin of a comrade; change was impossible to avoid. At least the change was good, this time around.

Before Loki had to answer, the door  _ shicked  _ open once more. FRIDAY chimed a hello, but Loki and Stark knew instantly who the arrival was. His footsteps were light and eager, and his breathing came quick, as though he’d traveled in great haste. Peter.

“Hi guys,” the boy announced, leaning against the door for a moment. “I figured you’d be here.”

Loki didn’t answer, eyes fixed on the set of packages in Peter’s hand. Stark, on the other hand, said, “well, it’s not as though I’d be anywhere else.”

“Hm” was Peter’s only reply. He wandered over to where Loki sat, perching next to him and handing him one of the containers. Loki glowered at it, then at Peter.

“Eat it, you fiend,” Peter instructed. “There’s only  _ exactly  _ enough calories in it to maintain your current health.”

Loki grumbled disbelievingly. Peter poked him. “It’s true,” the boy said, “I did the calculations.” 

“‘Course you did,” Stark sighed, though his tone was affectionate. 

“I have to do something.” Peter moved over to the engineer and brandished the second package at him. “And math is as good as anything. Helps me keep up with all the useless school stuff.”

“Useless,” Loki agreed. Stark looked under his brows at both of them, but didn’t say anything.

Peter brandished the food a bit more aggressively. “I do love the ship, Mr. Stark,” he chirped. “It’s homey and complete and efficient and we could do so much worse. I doubt we could do  _ better.”  _

“Definitely.” Stark finally took the food. He patted the controls of the ship heartily and beamed at the thick walls and the nothingness outside them. “She’s a beauty, our  _ Beyond.”  _

“Here here,” Peter and Loki echoed. 

In the silence that followed, Loki poked dispassionately at his meal. It resembled oatmeal, or perhaps yogurt, and it was a muddy reddish color that was decidedly unappetizing. It would keep indefinitely, sure, but that didn’t mean Loki had to enjoy it, much less  _ appreciate  _ it. 

“Absolutely nauseating,” Loki proclaimed as he licked a bit off the edges of the plastic.

“Stop complaining.” Stark had consumed his in a messy slurp, heedless of the sensation. 

“Disgusting.”

As Loki picked at his food, Peter had ambled over to run his hands over the aura of the ship’s controls. He wasn’t stupid; he’d never dream of actually touching it, but he obviously enjoyed puzzling at them as much as he had the features of Stark and Shuri’s labs’. He frowned, after a moment. Loki, thankful for the excuse to turn his attention away from his meal, leaned forward to try and observe what had drawn the boy’s attention. But nothing noticeable jumped into his gaze, so he turned his head toward Peter instead. 

“Mr. Stark?” the boy wondered.

“Yeah, kid?” 

“Is this an AUX cord?”

He was holding the end of a wire before his face, the end tipped with a silvery probe of metal. Loki narrowed his eyes at it. It wasn’t sharp enough to break skin, though it was perhaps thin enough that brute force could result in some amount of damage. As such, Loki had no hypothesis as to its purpose.

“Oh, yeah.” Stark stood. “Looks like it. Shuri must’ve added that while I was focused on implementing the warp-core.”

Peter grinned. “Shuri has officially made the most important contribution, then.”

Stark laughed, trotting over to stand next to Peter. Loki did the same, wondering why such an inconsequential object could be making his brother-in-arms so excited.

“What is this?” Loki wondered, extending a finger to prod at the cord.

“It plays music,” Peter said. “Or at least, it connects something that plays music to a set of speakers that make the music louder.”

Loki fumbled in his pocket for his phone. “Like this?”

“If you’ve got any music downloaded, yeah!” Peter grinned at him. “I doubt you do, though. You can use mine if you want.”

“Wait wait wait,” Stark protested, “who said we were letting the Asgardian be DJ?”

“I did.” Peter ceremoniously passed the cord into Loki’s hands. 

Unsure what to do with it, Loki just held it vertically until Peter also offered him his own cellular device and indicated the hole that the cord apparently fit within. Loki carefully inserted it, and was rewarded with a satisfying clicking noise. 

“Now what?”

“Now, you experiment! I’ve got a whole library of shit—” he broke off, glancing at Stark, and amended, “stuff for you to look through. Just tap any of the lines here and a song will play.”

Loki, interested now, began to scroll through the lists upon lists of strange titles that Peter had pulled up. Each seemed to ooze a certain emotion, or tease at a certain story, and Loki found himself yearning to understand the content of each and every one. He wanted to play them all, to experience those emotions and those stories.

So he did. Loki set his finger to one of the titles and sent the noise spinning throughout the ship.

* * *

The lyrics of an unexpected song spurted through the ship with enough force to knock Stephen out of his meditative stupor. He slammed back against the floor of his quarters with a bump, blinking open eyes he hadn’t realized he’d closed. Limbs a bit heavy, he fumbled at the objects around him until he encountered the bedframe to pull himself to his feet. 

_ ‘I was following the pack, I was following their coats,’  _ came the words dancing through his room. Stephen pivoted on his toes as if to chase them. 

_ ‘The scarves of red tied ‘round their throats, to keep their little heads from falling in the snow…’  _

The entire ship resonated with the noise, and Stephen sat down against the springs of his bed, blinking up at the ceiling. He hadn’t realized they had such effective acoustics. Then again, it was Shuri and Tony Stark he was talking about.

_ ‘And I turn ‘round and there you go! And Michael, you would fall and turn the white snow red as strawberries in the summertime…’ _

Oh, he did know this chorus; “White Winter Hymnal”, Fleet Foxes, 2008. Whoever had this downloaded—he doubted Stark had found some way to independently rout their spaceship to the data of Earth—had good taste.

It was a good song. A good song. Stephen aggressively pushed away the nagging thought that it wasn’t his song of the day. 

It looked like the quiet was over.

  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It beginssssss...


	102. More Curiosity

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shorter chapter; just some interaction and setup.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_February 2017_ **

 

Up to his elbows in grease, Peter sat back with a satisfied huff. He swiped his knuckles across his brow. His whole face was likely smeared with the stuff at this point, but Peter didn’t mind; the smell was familiar, and the texture was of home.

He likely should have asked Tony face-to-face if he could spend a few hours in the ship’s tiny but fully equipped workshop, but the cockpit was across the  _ Beyond  _ and he hadn’t wanted to cross all the way back there for a quick few words. But he’d asked FRIDAY, and she’d told him he was welcome. So here Peter was, still in his pajamas, tinkering away on nothing in particular. 

The metal curved before him was a shard of vibranium, glittering slightly as he shaped it. It was still a wonder that he could mess around with even a scrap of the stuff, yet here it lay in sheets for any innovation he might desire. Of course, Peter didn’t dare touch the nanotech or the pure vibranium, but these deformed fragments were objects he figured no one would miss.

Delicately lifting the still-warm disk he’d created, Peter cupped it carefully against his palm. He eyed an empty edge of the ship and lightly spun the disk outward, gaze fixed on the wanted point of contact.

The disk clanged to the ground a few feet away.

Peter, sighing against the challenge, went to retrieve it. Ever since August, he’d been wondering exactly what properties vibranium gifted a weapon, and how they came to exist. Specifically, a shield. 

But recreating a scaled prototype of the famous metal frisbee from pure memory with no experience with the tactile properties of vibranium was no walk in the park. Fortunately however, Peter had time.

All the time in the world, it seemed. 

He hated to admit it, but he was bored. It seemed everyone was bored, on differing scales, and Peter had begun to fall prey to the same achingly slow atmosphere that had taken hold of the ship. Loki was spending more and more time out of human form, and it worried Peter. Tony hardly ever came out of the cockpit… for such a usually active man, it was peculiar. And concerning. 

He’d go over later, Peter told himself as he gathered his circle of vibranium and returned to the workbench. Perhaps he could convince Tony to let him have the AUX cord again. He was getting tired of AC-DC, not that he’d admit it with a gun to his head. And from the way Strange kept aggressively humming different songs over top of the ones playing ship-wide, Peter figured the rest of the crew was quickly approaching actually acquiring said gun. 

“FRIDAY,” Peter called, looking up from the metal. He almost missed his chair as he tried to sit. “Does Mr. Stark have any information about Captain Rogers’ shield? Like the physics of it, I mean?”

“He does,” FRIDAY answered immediately, “but they aren’t programmed into my portable database, and I lack connection to the files stored within the Compound.”

“Damn,” Peter huffed. “Guess we will be reinventing the wheel.”

“May I inquire as to the purpose of your invention?” FRIDAY’s voice was slightly teasing, and Peter looked up again. 

“Oh, I’m just curious,” he replied truthfully. “The Captain doesn’t even have the shield anymore, so I figure there’s no harm in trying to figure out the secret. Maybe I can use it, somehow. Shift the properties of the curvature to add another nozzle to my web-shooters.”

“Sounds productive.”

Peter huffed. “Doing anything at all is productive at this point.”

FRIDAY whirred into silence, and Peter took that as agreement. He flexed his hands beneath their gloves and leaned across the table to adjust the settings of what might have once been an English Wheel before Tony Stark got his hands on it. The vibranium was malleable in the form Peter had alloyed, though the tools within the workshop were vibranium themselves.  _ Cut diamond with diamond.  _

With the wheel rotating relatively slowly, Peter set to work decreasing the curvature of his disk. The metal warped beneath the rolling pressure. Resisting the urge to bite his tongue, Peter kept careful and consistent pressure on the small object, and an even curve began to emerge. 

Fluorescent light glanced of the grooves of the metal as Peter pulled the disk away to check his handiwork. He wondered, vaguely, what vibranium must look like beneath the shine of sunlight.

They hadn’t reached lightspeed yet, but they were close; Peter could feel it, the unimaginable acceleration, the pull of the forces of the universe against his form. He didn’t know if the others could. 

He thought they might, in their own way. 

“If you want, Mr. Parker, I could…” FRIDAY suddenly spoke, startling Peter from his concentration. He stuck to the disk to keep it from fumbling out of his fingers. 

“What? What?” 

“I could assemble a curriculum. If you would like. Math and science and composition, to keep up with your academic skill. But on the subjects you would like to pursue, not predetermined ones.”

It was a testament to his boredom, to the endless months that stretched before them before their next adventure, that Peter didn’t stop listening at the words “academic skill.” It was further testament that the last sentence, the promise of a  _ challenge  _ and not a  _ lesson,  _ gripped at his mind with something like excitement. 

“What do you mean?” Peter wondered, looking up toward the ceiling. 

“I have quite a few base directives,” FRIDAY said, “that I thought interesting in the past and downloaded into my source code. Boss was encouraging of it; he even expanded my memory to allow for ‘more curiosity’, he said. I could use them to teach you.”

Peter imagined bright, interested lines of code—FRIDAY—poking freely through the internet when she first awoke, and smiled. “I think I might like that,” he said.

“I have information on most forms of mathematics,” FRIDAY continued, “as well as geometric optics. Aquatic anatomy. Photosynthesis.”

“I’m sold.”

“Linguistic history. Theology. Biomimicry. And—well, I do have quite the memory on creative writing.” She sounded almost embarrassed about that.  

“That’s awesome,” Peter yelped. “You’d really—you’d teach me all that?”

“If you’d like.”

_ “Please.”  _ Peter grinned, and hoped she could perceive it. “Really, FRI, that’d be wonderful.”

The lights flickered, and Peter thought it looked like the room was smiling. “Alright, Mr. Parker. Give me a few hours to assemble what I can.”

“Of course! Take all the time you need. I’ll go bother Mr. Stark in case he needs help while you’re working.”

“No need. I can run multiple programs at once.”

“Oh.” Peter blushed. “Right. I keep forgetting, y’know…” 

“That I’m a disembodied program operating on a digital network and not at all human?”

“Yeah, that.”

FRIDAY flickered again. “Don’t worry, Mr. Parker,” she chuckled. “It’s rather flattering. Despite my capabilities however, I do encourage you to visit the boss.”

“Sure.” Peter got to his feet, switching off the tools and reordering the metal back to where he’d found it. He left his disk on the side of the workbench for later. “I’d like that.”

With his project balanced on the edge of the desk and the workshop seemingly in order, Peter made his way to the door that lead back out toward the central hall. It was a sliding hatch—everything was in order to keep the halls as open as possible—but it practically slammed open at Peter’s pull. 

There was someone pulling it from the other side. 

Peter almost stepped directly into Natasha Romanoff, only barely stopping himself by instinctively sticking to the floor. She pounced hastily backward. It freed the doorway for Peter’s steadying hands, and he yelped an automatic apology. 

“Oh, sorry,” he said, shuffling sideways into the hall. 

“No, no.” Romanoff waved a hand. “I should have knocked like a normal person. Just didn’t expect anyone in here.”

“Right. Yeah, I was just…” Peter fumbled. Why was he explaining himself? “Tinkering.”

Romanoff nodded by way of acknowledgement and went to slip into the workshop. Curious, and a little defensive, Peter almost reached out to stop her. 

“What are you doing?” he inquired.

She lifted an eyebrow. “Is it any of your business?”

_ That  _ snatched the hesitance from Peter’s stance. He squared his shoulders and shifted his weight onto his toes, jaw feathering defensively. Reaching out again, this time fully intending to block her path, he saw Romanoff smile. It was a satisfied expression, like someone who’d just been proven right, as Romanoff took in the entirety of Peter’s stance without even blinking.

She looked like MJ.

“So you can do it,” Romanoff said before Peter could so much as open his mouth. 

“I—wha?”

“Excuse my rudeness. I’m looking for tape, actually, duct if we have it.”

Peter blinked. “We… do.”

Romanoff nodded again, dancing into the room before them and casting quick eyes around the area. They landed back on him after a moment. “Oh, don’t look so confused. I wanted to see if you could fight without a mask.”

Peter’s brow furrowed. He had half a mind to discharge the webbing at his wrist, to climb a wall, to  _ prove  _ himself. It was almost involuntary. “Of course I can—”

“Not with your hands,” Romanoff clarified. “All of you are perfectly capable of killing something without a conversation. But that’s not the only way of fighting.”

Peter cocked his head, confused. And a bit interested, despite himself. “What do you mean?”

Romanoff paused, stopping her movements in order to look directly at Peter. He felt something crawling at his spine like his eight-legged namesake, and shivered. 

“To be frank, I’m concerned that I’m the only capable spy on this ship,” Romanoff admitted. Her long fingers drummed on the desk beside her. “But you’re not hopeless.”

Peter blinked. He wasn’t sure that was a compliment. And either way, the observation made little sense; Peter  _ wasn’t  _ a spy, nor was he an interrogator. Remembering his brief experience with it made him cringe. 

But what he said wasn’t a thanks, an expression of disbelief, or a demand. Peter just asked, “have you talked to everyone?”

Romanoff blinked. “It’s only you three I need to speak to. Tony and Steve I know.”

“Right. Well, you’re better off with Loki.” Peter jerked a thumb in the direction of the god’s room, though he hadn’t seen Loki since he went to sleep twelve or so hours ago. It was a bit strange, now that he thought about it; Loki was usually eager to keep track of Peter, and vice versa. Perhaps he should ask FRIDAY…

“I’m not after people who can run a room or direct a crowd,” Romanoff said. She’d found the tape where it was stuffed into one of the drawers and was striding back toward Peter. “If I was,” she continued, “I’d need look no further than Tony Stark. Loki is the same; he gets his way through fear and intimidation. There are further personas that need taken, occasionally.” 

 Peter thought of his brother-in-arms standing furiously before a wizard,  _ ordering  _ Strange to help them. He thought of Loki’s quiet, genuine words on Jul, the shine of non-existent firelight against his pale skin. He thought of subtle magic to create soft atmospheres, clean expressions to comfort and to inspire. 

“I think you’re mistaken,” Peter said softly.

Romanoff blinked at that. "Oh?"

Peter just nodded. 

"Alright then. I suppose I shouldn't jump to conclusions about Loki anymore, but it's... habit, I suppose."

"That's justified," Peter allowed, watching Romanoff as she spun the duct tape over one wrist. 

"Mm. Either way, you have potential when it comes to all sorts of skill sets, it seems."

Peter snorted. “I've __ been told from multiple sources that I’m about as intimidating as a sponge.”

Romanoff slipped out into the hallway beside him, sliding the door shut behind her. “Exactly. It didn’t stop you from being ready to fight, which is its own type of intimidating. People don’t expect a stuttering child to be able to hurt them with a flick of his wrist. They don’t expect him to fight back in an interrogation, or turn the interrogation back on them. They don’t expect him to steal an Infinity Stone from beneath their noses.”

Peter edged down the hallway a bit. “But I’m just—that’s just the way I am. It’s not a  _ persona  _ I’m putting on to get what I want.”

Romanoff started back up the hall toward the curling dorms and training center, and Peter would have taken his chance to flee from the conversation had the cockpit not also been in that direction. He almost turned oppositely anyway. 

There was a reason he hadn’t sought Romanoff out, hadn’t sought Rogers out. Besides the obvious, he simply didn’t know who they were. He didn’t know how to interact with them, or what they would think of both his character and his capabilities. He didn’t  _ want  _ to know. Now, when the Widow seemed to observe him as a kind of resource, Peter was caught off-guard. He wasn't sure if he should be flattered or offended. 

“It could be a persona,” Romanoff pointed out, “if you wanted it to be. It could be an awfully useful one.”

Peter huffed inwardly, trotting off after her in the direction of the control room. He didn’t answer, and she didn’t prompt anything else. Twirling the duct-tape around one finger, Romanoff drew a few paces in front of him, gait smooth and purposeful.

She walked like Tony. Or maybe he walked like her.

The journey to the other end of the  _ Beyond  _ was the longest of Peter’s life, washed in awkward silence and anticipatory tension. Badly timed AC-DC boasted too loudly to be background music. Peter’d never been so aware of the lines between the tiles of the floor before. And he was pretty sure the section directly beneath the training center was colder than usual. 

Romanoff waved a quick goodbye when they reached the edge of the hall, ducking toward the ladder leading toward the training center. Half wanting to ask what she planned to do with the tape around her arm, Peter waved back. Romanoff was gone a second later. Just as quickly, Peter slipped into the cockpit and the heart of the  _ Beyond.  _

“Hey!” Tony crowed the moment he crossed the threshold. “The spider boy emerges!”

“Hi, Mr. Stark,” Peter laughed, trotting across to where the man was sitting, hands beside his head and feet up on the table before him. 

“How’s your morning so far?”

“Is it morning then?” Peter wondered. He perched on the table beside Tony’s feet, flicking them with one fingernail. A low  _ plunk  _ rewarded him for his efforts. 

“Would be, if we’d spent this many hours on Earth.”

“What time is it there?”

“On Earth?” Tony sat up. “Uh, the time dilation is minimized by the warp-core, so around 9:30, I think.”

“Nice.” Peter flicked the shoes again.

“We should be reaching lightspeed the day after tomorrow,” Tony said. “And then  _ boom.  _ We’re off, finally.”

“Can’t wait! How’s the core and the fuel and stuff?”

Tony opened his hands in that gesture that was half shrug, half invitation for applause. “All fine. Systems are  _ go.” _

“Great.”

They were silent, for a moment. Peter stopped his flicking, resting his hand on Tony’s ankle and looking out the visor before them. Nothing, as always; a whole lot of nothing.

“Great,” Peter said again. “Can I have the AUX cord?”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nothing is happening and it's making you all nervous I can tell. ;P


	103. Make a Home

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The knife used by Loki here was donated in the comments a number of chapters back by one HolyCrepe. I thank you for your kind gift that I did not, in fact, forget about. Whoops. 
> 
> Anyway, enjoy this!!! Some Cloak page time here because I love it and I just found my own trench coat again after the move and am thus feeling sentimental toward long, warm garments.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_February 2017_ **

 

The dry rations stacked like Tetris blocks within the tiny cabinets of the  _ Beyond _ ’s kitchen had the variety of flavors attributable to sand. Stephen was sampling them. The tawny gold ones were his favorite—not because of any taste he could distinguish, but because they were almost the exact shade magic had been before it was sickened. 

Sitting on the low step beneath one of the wide quartz-glass windows, Stephen munched distractedly on a square and tucked his nose into one of the tomes he’d brought along with him. It was in Scythian, a northeastern Iranian script he wasn’t fluent in yet, so both the learning and the content was a challenge. A challenge much tastier than his lunch. 

“What do you think?” he asked the Cloak, mouth full. Beside him, a thermos of tea sat newly filled; it was technically forbidden to manifest edibles, but there was no one around to yell at him for it.

The Cloak lifted a corner to tap twice on one of the words, and Stephen nodded. “Me too. Enchantment?”

Another bob. Stephen brushed the fabric off his page and leaned down closer, peering at the ancient squiggles. “I think this is describing a totem—oh good, a travel spell! Needed more of these.”

The number of dimensions the Order had access to was quite substantial, but when compared to the ages they had existed, it was their most meager resource. To jump between dimensions, one needed a totem—an object that originated from the dimension in question. And to get that totem for the first time, when the walls of reality were still closed to you… well, it was impossible.

So the totems were gathered through many dimensional catastrophes—from creatures that had burst into their Earthen realm, through kidnapped sorcerers that had found their way home, through astral planes and pocket dimensions. Stephen had found two of his own since he first came to Kamar-Taj. It was an unspoken competition between him and Wong, but Stephen’s affinity for disaster gave him quite the advantage. 

“This seems like a nice world,” Stephen hummed as he carefully flipped an aging page.

The Cloak poked him lightly, and Stephen laughed. “Yeah I know, famous last words. But is does seem nice!

“ _ ‘The land is water and the water is life,’”  _ he read aloud, swallowing his next bite of dry ration.  _ “‘The creatures move slow and the plants move fast, to grow upon and trail behind their steps. They sing.’  _ Sounds lovely.”

This ancient sorcerer’s story was sad, in that tragically beautiful way of poetry. She’d written the spellwork and the descriptions while trapped within the other world, lost in a realm with no language, no culture, no society, no consciousness of any form. A peaceful dimension, a even and long-lasting life, but a lonely one.

In a world of music and peace, forsaken. 

“At least she made it back,” Stephen murmured. Peace did not make safety, beauty did not make comfort. No matter how long you spent in a place, no matter how well you knew it, no matter how many memories it contained…that didn’t make it a home. 

Stephen wasn’t sure what did. Not anymore. 

He took another bite of his square—now more oblong than anything else—and turned sideways so he could stretch his feet out on the step next to him. The Cloak wriggled, trying to make itself comfortable, and Stephen paused to let it rearrange itself. He made the mistake of trying to take another bite and accidentally caught the hem of the relic in his teeth as well.

Spitting it out quickly, Stephen laughed through crumbs. “Sorry!” he yelped, fending away a slap. “You were in the way!”

The Cloak crossed its corners in front of him and billowed a huff. After a placating pat, it settled down, and Stephen braced the book on his thighs. He tapped his fingers to the rhythm of song playing over the speaker—”Don’t Stand So Close To Me” by the Police. 

Not his song. It could have been, if it had been played a bit earlier, but that honor went to a different tune. Stephen had thought it’d be better to let Stark indirectly chose each day’s song, to let the first piece of music that Stephen heard in the day become the one associated with the continued advance of time. But songs repeated each day, and others were played between, and Stephen was fearful of the possibility that he’d wake to the same song twice in a row. 

Of the possibility that he’d wake to the same day twice in a row. 

The dry rations stuck to a suddenly dry throat, and Stephen coughed. He closed the book around one finger and laid it beside him as another breath caught crumbs. He hacked into his elbow, eyes watering, until he could inhale freely again. 

The Eye was heavy around his neck, so heavy that it pulled his spine into curling down, his head resting on his knees. Pulling its edges over his legs, the Cloak enveloped him as much as it could. Stephen shivered into it. 

He could hear the Time Stone whispering, a totem all of its own. The sound was peaceful, was soft, was beautiful, but not comfortable. Never comfortable again, not when the memory of another voice rumbled like cold thunder behind the Stone’s.

Stephen’s own voice. 

_ Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.  _

Violet eyes and silver skin and looming, roaring forms. Ice and darkness, color flashing like lethal sunlight on the edge of a prism, rumbling and orotund voices. A promise, a gasp, a scream. The rip of skin and the slick, musty scent of blood, the wet slap of a body slamming against the earth and the light breath of desperate magic, again and again and  _ again.  _

And for a moment. Only one moment, hanging like a falcon in flight. 

_ Dormammu, I’ve come to bargain.  _

“Shut up,” Stephen hissed, raising trembling hands to curve around his ears.  _ “Shut up.” _

The Eye burned at his neck, and Stephen wrapped a tight fist around it. He half expected his skin to come away blistered.

But it didn’t. The Eye didn’t open, and the words didn’t pursue Stephen as he hauled himself back toward reality. Turning to face them, Stephen wrapped his hands around the hilt of a sword made of lyrics and began singing softly.

Beside him, the Cloak fluttered—a rhythmic tapping to the beat of the song of the day. Behind their two-being acapella, a different song trilled, threatening to melt the weapon Stephen so relied on. 

 But not this time. Stephen broke the loop with a shake of his head and a gritting of his teeth, standing abruptly and sending his book tumbling. The remains of his lunch had crumbled into nothing; he couldn’t quite remember when. The Eye thumped against his chest—once, twice.

“Sorry,” he said to the Cloak, and bent down to retrieve the tome. It was far heavier than the delicate metal Eye would ever be, he thought. 

His relic flapped at him, hovering in that way that always made him think of when it had first come to him, how it had never left. How it had always been here, through everything. 

“You know,” he said as he left the galley, “I never asked if you remember. The loop, I mean—do you ever get stuck too?”

The Cloak fluttered.

And for once, Stephen couldn’t read its meaning.

* * *

The drawn-out note of Loki’s name had him straightening up abruptly from where he was conjuring snake illusions across the door of his room. Loki blinked, and the snakes disappeared in puffs of green light. Sweeping his feet beneath him, he surged to his feet and made for the door, peering around it with raised eyebrows. 

Peter stood on the other side, waving amicably. He held his phone in one open palm. Loki, eyebrows lowering, ducked back behind the door to open it completely. 

“Peter,” he greeted, beckoning him in.

“Are you busy?” Peter wondered.

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

“Ha.” The boy pounced onto Loki’s cot, the springs creaking under his weight. He rolled onto his back, cast his phone aside, and propped his head up on both hands. “Fantastic. No excuse then.”

Loki narrowed his eyes. “No excuse to what?”

“To run away, of course.” Peter grinned.

Loki was beginning to feel slightly unnerved. “Why would I wish to run…?”

Peter’s grinned widened. “Don’t worry, I’m not gonna perform some sadistic ritual or anything. Me and FRIDAY just want to ask you some questions.”

“Questions,” Loki said flatly, perching on the edge of the mattress. Peter wriggled around to face him.

“Yes, it’s for our theology course,” Peter explained.

“Your  _ what?”  _

“FRIDAY and I are learning about the history of religion. Or, FRIDAY’s teaching me about it; she offered a few days ago.” Peter spoke around a yawn, and Loki relaxed. 

“Kind of her,” Loki admitted. 

“Thank you,” Peter’s phone exclaimed in the voice of the AI. Loki’s knife was instantly in hand, pointed with lightning lethality toward the unexpected noise. 

“Woah woah woah,” Peter yelped. “Please don’t stab that I need it.”

Loki stabbed the mattress instead, then pivoted to lay sideways. The knife squeaked where the blade scraped against a hidden spring. 

“Why am I being questioned when it comes to… theology?” Loki wondered. 

“Well, because you’re part of it.”

Loki cocked his head. Pulling the knife out of the mattress and tossing it back to Loki, Peter’s grin softened into something more curious, more thoughtful. Loki dematerialized the knife and waited. 

“Most of the time,” Peter explained, “religions develop gradually, building off the beliefs before them. And they’re just that—beliefs. There’s no scientific proof, conflicting descriptions of history, and all that. But that’s not true for the Scandinavians.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. Those are the guys who worship you.”

Loki blinked. “I thought all my minions had died off.”

“Oh yeah, the vikings lived thousands of years ago. But! They told stories of you and Thor and the rest of Asgard, gave offerings, and enacted traditions.”

“So?”

Peter poked at him, making a face.  _ “So,  _ I want to know how much of it is true.”

Oh. 

Peter wanted to know about Loki. He wanted to know about Asgard. He wanted to know about Odin and Heimdal, wanted to know about the giants and the gods, the monsters and their treasures. Asgard’s history was long and ugly, twisted and elegant, and Peter was curious and excited and unafraid of his ignorance. Loki’s little brother wanted to know Loki’s story. 

“What do you wish to know?” Loki asked softly.

Peter replied without hesitation, expression lighting up even further. “Were you there, when Asgardians first came to Earth?”

“It was… a long time ago,” Loki hummed. “But yes, I was. Odin brought me and Thor across the realms when we came of age, and when we reached Midgard, we were met by a group of humans. They were skilled and quite brave, even in the face of our might and magic.”

“Scandinavians?”

Loki shrugged. “I assume. Odin was impressed by their dispositions, so he decided to linger in Midgard for a while longer. The humans offered their quaint homes and meager foodstuffs, and we accepted gratefully, if with a bit of confusion.

“They thought we came from other areas of their world, and asked us questions about them that we could not answer. We taught them our language, in order to properly thank them for their welcome—always valued, on Asgard. But weeks became months, and months became more than a year on Midgard with these funny, brave little humans.”

Loki remembered those months—not with astonishing clarity, for he’d been young, but as well as anyone would remember such an adventure. He remembered teaching a little girl about Yggdrasil, remembered her towing him by hand through the vast forests of her homeland. They found the biggest trees, climbed them together, and tried to find the one that curled its branches into the rest of the Realms. 

He remembered shifting into a horned beast he’d later been told was called a reindeer in the pursuit of thrill. Odin had forbidden interference, but there’d been a hunt that night. Asgardians and Midgardians would run together, and Loki remembered racing through forests as the game, with the arrows falling like snowflakes around him. He remembered leaping into a lynx’s graceful form just before he was struck, and only barely managing to escape the hunters, bloody and limping.

Odin never knew Loki had left the village that night. But Thor had helped Loki bandage his leg when he'd snuck in just before morning, and the next day, Loki had heard him telling stories of a phantom reindeer. Odin bought them without any suspicion towards Loki’s sudden injury. 

Loki smiled a bit. So much had changed, and so little. 

“Loooki,” Peter huffed, drawing Loki’s attention back to the present time. 

“Apologies, yes.” Loki shook himself. “We told stories and made friends, demonstrating our abilities. I suppose it isn’t shocking that we became their guiding legends when we left.”

“Suppose not,” Peter agreed. “Did you take any traditions from them?”

“Probably. Thoughts and emotions and empathy.” Peter smirked at him, and Loki glowered. “What?”

“Nothing. You’re just very sentimental sometimes.”

Loki hissed at him. “I’m Loki, Prince of Lies and God of Mischief,” he glowered. “I am not  _ sentimental.” _

“Sure.”

“I’m not.”

Peter laughed, rolling over onto his back. Mattress stuffing fluffed up through the rent lying between them, and Loki half-heatedly shoved it back in as Peter poked his knee. They were silent for a moment, Peter thinking of more questions and Loki trying not to fall back into childhood recollection. 

They weren’t dead in this timeline, not yet. Loki had that to hang on to. 

“Did any other peoples see you?” Peter asked finally. “Like, did you get any merchants or prospectors or anything?”

Loki shook his head. “We were north—no one thought to venture toward us. Your histories describe our people coming on scourge seas; it was indeed the west’s first encounter with those we’d influenced.”

“Huh,” Peter said. “Well, they’re rather lucky. Why didn’t you ever come back?”

“To Earth?”

Peter nodded, and Loki leaned back again with a huff. “Asgard rules the Nine Realms. We had other business to attend to.”

_ Other business  _ like Thor’s questing and Loki’s lessons.  _ Other business  _ like thousands of years of lies.  _ Other business  _ like the throne. 

_ Other business  _ like Jotenhiem. 

“Understandable,” Peter said. “Wars to win and golden castles to build. Are there really golden castles?”

“Yes.”

“Nice. Will we get to see it?”

“As we are going to Asgard, I assume we will, in fact, see it,” Loki sighed. “Or you will. It is still possible that I won’t leave the ship at all.”

“What? Why?”

Loki hummed, materializing his knife again. “Well, I would enact a disguise throughout, but I’d be… quite close to another multiversal version of myself. If he finds out, the things he’s about to do and the lessons he’s about to learn…” Loki shook his head. “He may never realize them.”

“Your timeline’s really that important, huh.” Peter poked offhandedly at the hole in the mattress, looking at Loki. 

“I believe that it is,” Loki agreed. “Ragnarok is coming, and Thor and I… yes. It’s that important.”

“Alright then. We’ll be careful, you know. If the Tesseract is where you say it is, and Hela arrives when she should, I don’t think there’s anything to fear.”

“It is,” Loki assured, “and she will. And yet, I still worry about our meddling. It’s unwarranted.”

“Maybe.” Peter drummed his hands as he spoke— _ one two, one two, one two three.  _ “I don’t have a bad feeling though. I sometimes get a tingle when things are going to go badly, but I haven’t gotten it thinking about Asgard.”

Loki perked up. “A tingle?” he wondered curiously.

“Yeah, it’s part of my powers.” Peter waggled his fingers and made a face. He looked ridiculous. Rolling his eyes, Loki put his palm over the boy’s face and shoved him down toward the bed. Peter licked him. 

“Hey!” Loki yelped, but Peter just laughed. 

“You started it. And anyway, I call it my spider-sense.”

Loki’s mind wandered back to a windowsill in Queens and a pair of sweatpants—cringing at the latter—and asked, “more of your magic?”

Peter smiled. “Yeah,” he said, “more of my magic.”  

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I want a historical fic about young Thor and Loki and their time on Earth with Odin and the vikings. Like really, really badly want one.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Tune in next time for a helping hand and an arc reactor. :)


	104. What Good Days Feel Like

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back in black! Well, back in like a cerulean blue. Maybe a bit of yellow, but only for spice. White accents?
> 
> The point is I'm back hERE READ THIS--

 

**Earth-200004:** **_March 2017_ **

 

When he was a child, Tony had sat in the theater half a block from his SI’s outreach center and taken great pleasure in yelling the scientific inaccuracies of  _ A New Hope  _ at the screen.  _ ‘Sound doesn’t travel in space!’  _ he’d called, earning him sharp glares from the rest of the moviegoers.  _ ‘Parsecs aren’t a measure of time!’  _

_ ‘Light speed travel is impossible!’ _

Tony’d loved that movie, despite his cynical outer shell. It was almost more fun that way, though he’d had his moments of purposeful suspension of disbelief many a time. He had always wondered what it might feel like to watch physics shoot by outside his window. To understand what those stories should look like. 

Now, outside the  _ Beyond,  _ the universe had become something so very new. 

Traveling faster than light meant one would be ramming headlong into photons that were usually racing away, passing out of range before they could reach one’s eyes. But within the bubble of space created by their warp core, their speed was no more than that of the Earth spinning on its axis. The light of their ship reached eyes and acted normally. Which was more essential than he’d realized, Tony thought as he watched the chaotic vibration of bent and colliding photons outside of the visor and the reach of the core’s magic. 

Stars did not streak into whiteness when a ship jumped to hyperspace, it turned out. Stars blurred together in an extreme example of the Doppler Effect, painting their vision in blue and a pulsing circular glow that seemed to move along with one’s vision. 

_ Fascinating,  _ Tony mused as he tilted his head, rolling it on his shoulders to watch the behavior of the light. 

Nine days after they’d reached light speed, the  _ Beyond  _ had finally achieved its maximum velocity. Twenty-eight days in flight, total, and no one was dead. 

Tony thought that was a rather impressive accomplishment.

“FRIDAY,” Tony said, flopping backwards in his chair, “you’re regulating the X-ray input, right?”

“Correct, boss. The tempering of the magic is deflecting most of it.”

“Still at healthy levels?”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

Tony stood up, rocking over onto his toes and back down onto flat fleet. He then proceeded to sashay around the cockpit in a long rehearsed and since perfected routine of checking monitors and datastreams and plugs; tapping on keyboards; rearranging Peter’s downloaded playlist to something a little more to his liking; and running calculations on their timeline and ETA with the updated timestamps from the hour before. It took no more than fifteen minutes. Tony gave the empty room a bow when every test returned negative and every system was operating perfectly, unrepentantly taking total credit. 

“Who’s around to complain?” Tony huffed. He surveyed the room one last time, then swiveled on his heel and stalked out into the corridor. Knocking twice on the door of their second restroom—still not in use, to conserve power—he started off toward his room.

He didn’t spend much time there, preferring to snatch his short dozes of sleep in the cockpit, but he did keep most of his belongings in the small, cramped area. His clothes and personals remained stuffed in one corner, yes, but also the team’s backup weaponry, his own tools, and a number of electronics. They were still somewhat organized. And he’d recently moved the Mind Stone’s containment unit to his room from the cockpit, where it would be further from the warp core. 

So despite Tony’s best attempts at avoiding his bedroom, it was comfortably cluttered when he slipped inside. Brushing his hands on the front of his shirt, he slid the door shut behind him. A clean set of clothes was hiding on the edge of his cot. He failed to find a jacket he hadn’t already littered around the laundry center across the ship, however, though that was to be expected. 

Sighing, Tony flopped down onto the edge of his cot and stepped into the new pair of pants. They were unfortunately a solid color. He made up for it with an aggressively contrasting T-shirt, patterned with retina-scorching fuchsia. 

“Nailed it,” Tony huffed. He thought about getting up for a solid four seconds. Then he folded himself back across the little bed, catching the wall with his elbow and grimacing at the unexpected pain. 

Only silence greeted him. Tony grimaced some more.

“I’m bored again, FRIDAY,” he huffed to the ceiling. 

“That sounds like a personal problem, boss.”

Tony punched the wall again, and FRIDAY laughed, winking the lights a little. Such an irreverent little program—and god did Tony love her. 

It was in moments like this that he wondered what made FRIDAY  _ FRIDAY  _ and not some extension of himself. He’d written everything that was her, everything that drove her, and yet she never failed to surprise him. She never failed to change, to grow, to be someone new. To be who he needed. Artificial, and yet so much more human than he could ever be. 

Tony blinked at the silvery curved ceiling of the  _ Beyond  _ and found himself still smiling. The lethargy of inaction pulled on his limbs, and he tapped his fingers to ward it off.

“Is the workshop open?” he wondered after a long moment.

It took FRIDAY a moment to answer, and he figured she was transferring her attention between the locations. She could run in both places at once, but passing data between her outputs was longer than instantaneous. 

“Peter’s in there,” was her reply after a beat. “He’s currently experimenting with one of the vibreanum scraps, as has been his project for a while now.”

“Mm, right.” Tony rocked his arms for a moment to gather momentum, then shoved upward into a sitting position. “I won’t bother him, then. Training center?”

“Clear, mostly.”

Tony raised an eyebrow. “Meaning…”

“Meaning Doctor Strange is occupying a small corner of it.”

“Probability that I could spend some time there without annoying him?”

FRIDAY hummed, flickering the lights slightly. “Oh, that depends on what you put your mind to, boss.”

Tony smirked a bit, then stood and wandered across the room to his belongings. He rummaged about for a pair of socks, unable to find a pair that matched without a little bit of digging. Burying his arm up to the elbow, Tony grimaced. He should really organize this shit. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do, anyway. 

The cold slice of something sharp ran across his palm, and Tony’s grimace turned into a yelp of pain. He quickly redrew his hand, glaring at the unbroken skin. Transferring the glare to the pile of clothes and hygiene products, he dug down toward whatever had the nerve to poke at him, feeling irrationally betrayed. 

The smooth, cold edge of an inactive arc reactor brushed his fingers.

Oh. It must have fallen from one of the shelves, shaking itself down to the bottom of the nest of clothes with the rocking of the spaceship. It was a relief he hadn’t yet woken the Mark 50 up, else the fall might’ve triggered it.

“Yeah, Tony, definitely organize the dump that is this room,” he groaned toward his idiocy and pulled the arc reactor from its hiding place. It sat on his palm like a fat, silken beetle, the glare winking off its unlit, blue-tinged surface. 

Tony frowned, turning it over. The back was just as smooth, though the long, thin hooks at the end would secure the reactor to almost any surface. What had dislodged it?

Unless… 

Closing his eyes, Tony fought to tune out the constant hum of the ship. He curled his other hand over the top of the arc reactor and concentrated, searching for the sound or the sight. 

There, against his right palm, only barely visible in the shadow of his left, was a faint blue glow. 

The nanites were active. 

Tony breathed an inhale that was part concern, part excitement. All the more carefully, he lifted the reactor to his chest and pressed it against the striped shirt, careful not to touch the containment unit. Then he reached for the black hoodie—the only thing folded in the entire space—and pulled it over his head. 

The garment was patterned almost reminiscent of camouflage; greys and blacks and a touch of orange. He’d cut a hole in its center the shape of the reactor; now, he tucked its edges against the metal on his chest to keep the nanites secure. It was the same hoodie he’d worn all those months ago, taking Peter out to ice-cream for the first time. Tony smiled a bit at the memory. 

The arc reactor hummed, almost to the same frequency as the ship. Tony narrowed his eyes, glancing up at the ceiling.

“FRI?”

“Yes, boss?”  
“Any readings from the reactor?”

“Did you activate it?” FRIDAY sounded interested. Tony knew how much she loved the suit—as much as he did, if not more, for the freedom of movement it offered her soul.

“No. But the nanites are definitely awake…”

“The energy… it’s similar to the warp core,” FRIDAY mused. “Perhaps the similar influences are compounded?”

Tony stood abruptly, almost tripping over the bedpost. “Well,” he muttered. “Good thing I was on my way to the wizard already.”

He hauled ass to the training center, stealing occasional glances at his chest. It had been so long since he’d felt the weight there, since he’d seen the light. And the memories weren’t all good, it was true, but there was something significant, something powerful and comforting about having the suit at his fingertips once more.

“Strange!” he called as he clambered up the ladder and into the sprawling deck of the training room. “Got a minute?”

In the time it took for his words to carry, Tony saw the man in question jump as though struck by lightning. Strange had been hovering a foot and a half above the ground, his Cloak absent for an unknown reason, and his eyes flew open as he slammed against the deck. He looked like a deer in headlights, or a child woken abruptly from a nap they’d said they wouldn’t take. 

Tony covered his snicker and strode toward the side of the room where Strange had positioned himself. He offered the wizard a hand. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you,” he said. Earlier, he might’ve followed with a quip, but he had questions to ask and though a bit of verbal sparring would be fun, Tony was already impatient. 

“It’s fine,” Strange replied. His gaze had found the arc reactor instantly, a furrow appearing between his eyebrows. He took Tony’s hand unconsciously, distracted by the tech they both hadn’t expected to see just yet.

Tony wasn’t really thinking either. He tightened his grip to help haul the man to his feet. 

And Strange let out a choked, pained hiss that had Tony instantly tensing in preparation for a threat, releasing the wizard’s grip and raising his hand to the arc reactor on instinct. Old habits cared not for time in the face of an unexpected warning. 

But there was no attack, no danger, no shock. Tony looked back at Strange, a bit confused.

And found his face tight, one of his hands carefully shielding the other. They were shaking harder, now, the scars winking almost wetly against his pale skin. 

Tony’s eyes widened. 

“Oh, shit,” he began, taking a step forward.

Strange glanced up at him, and though he released his hand quickly to hide the momentary vulnerability, it was with obvious effort. His fingers were tense when he dropped them to his side. They trembled. 

“It’s fine,” the wizard began.

But Tony was already extending his hand, taking the other’s wrist with far more care this time. Strange tensed as Tony let his fingers curl against his own, trying to support them as much as possible. “Sorry,” Tony said. “I didn’t realize…”

“It’s… um, usually not a problem,” Strange huffed. 

Tony raised an eyebrow at the man. Rolling multicolored eyes, the wizard repeated, “really, usually not. Today’s a bad day.”

“Need anything?” Tony wondered. His chest still ached sometimes when the weather was bad or he’d exerted himself excessively, though not as much after the surgery. He’d found a certain massaging pattern usually helped his breathing, but he had no idea what might be different with hands. 

Strange was looking at him like he’d grown another head, and Tony resisted the urge to cross his eyes. Barely. 

“No,” the wizard said. He removed his hand from Tony’s. “It’s really fine.”

“If you insist.” Tony stepped back, shoving his own hands in his pockets somewhat awkwardly.

He’d felt the shaking against him even when he’d supported the wizard’s fingers; the injury—disfigurement?—was truly quite extensive. The must be damage beyond just the integumentary scars, deep in the bones and nerves to cause that sort of involuntary reaction. And Tony’s grip hadn’t been  _ that  _ tight… he wondered just how sensitive they were. 

He wondered, if this was a bad day, what good days felt like. 

Strange tucked his hands into his sleeves, and Tony hastily tore his gaze away.  “What happened?” he asked, cocking his head. 

“Car crash,” Strange replied shortly. The look on his face clearly demanded  _ drop it,  _ but Tony wasn’t one for listening.

“Ow,” Tony said, which was perhaps not the most sympathetic of replies. “Must have been a hell of a collision. What happened to the other guy?”

“There was no other guy,” Strange told him flatly. “Just me.”

Tony blinked. “Alright then, I suppose then there isn’t anyone to blame. Was it after you became a wizard?”

“No.”

“... Okay.” Tony tried not to raise an eyebrow. Strange was not being very forthcoming. “After you were a—”

Tony blinked.

“Oh.”

Strange gave him a look, something dark swimming behind it. Tony resisted the urge to backtrack hurriedly, realizing the line he was getting very close to crossing. A neurosurgeon with a photographic memory, high on the taste of the air on top of the world…

A crash, an injury, and scars.

“And you can’t… magic anything? To help?”

“Not really, no.” Strange’s words were tight with irritation, and he stepped back away from Tony with something like a sigh. “Look, Stark, what do you want?”

“I’m not—” Tony cut himself off with a huff. “I just wanted to ask you about the warp core.”

“Oh?”

“Mm.” Tony tapped the center the arc reactor at his chest, just once, encouraging it to light up completely. The familiar glow was cool and clean, and it tinged Strange’s ivory skin blue. “I think it’s interacting with this.”

“The magic with the nanotech?”

“Yeah. The reactor’s activated any effort on my part, which should be impossible.” Tony was getting rather familiar with things that should be impossible. 

“I suppose the nanites could be reacting to the radiation of the core,” Strange mused. “There’s quite a lot of power, after all. Have they ever acted strangely around other types of engines?”

Tony shrugged. “They’re an engine all their own.”

“Perhaps its the potential energy of the magic, then. My power is the battery of the relic that is Loki’s spacial manipulation—it’s possible your nanites could be feeding off of it, as well.”

Tony frowned. “If they’re siphoning off power…”

“There’s enough to go around,” Strange assured. “The warp-core’s performance won’t be affected by your little robots sipping energy around its dimensional edges.”

“You sure? If it’s a relic, isn’t the power finite?”

“The core’s power is finite, sure, but it isn’t technically a relic.” Strange shrugged again, and the movement looked noticeably different without the Cloak on his shoulders. “My magic has been imbued into an object so it isn’t connected to me—or therefore reliant on me. Which means that Loki’s power can work based off of it instead of his own life force.”

“As opposed to…”

“As opposed to a relic, like the Cloak of Levitation, which is created from magic too powerful for humans to wield. Everlasting spells that’s sheer volume would burn us alive.”

“Lovely.” Tony rolled his eyes. 

“Don’t roll your eyes at the awe-inspiring capabilities of the Mystic Arts.”

Tony rolled his eyes again, tapping the reactor at his chest with a smirk. “Fine, fine, whatever. So there’s no need to panic about not having enough power to compress space to the necessary extent, so the actual science can get us to top speed?”

“No need to panic.”

“Fantastic.” Tony offered his most charming of grins. “Then let’s see if this works.”

The two taps, centered directly at the heart of the reactor, were echoed by the hum of nanotech. It sounded almost excited. And suddenly, unexpectedly, all-encompassingly, so was Tony. Tasting like citrus, like the sweet tang of the stage lights, anticipation curled up to rest on Tony’s tongue. He smiled.

And the nanites crawled—no, erupted—from their resting place, a wave of a thousand shining crystals swirling across Tony’s chest, hips, shoulders. They felt like the whisper of a warm ocean wind, almost tickling in their proximity. Down his legs, sealing around his knees in perfectly programmed locomotion, the suit began to take form. Silver as starlight, gold as cider, red as a promise. Tony felt like laughing, and maybe he did, as the nanotech circled his neck and closed across his face. 

“Boss?” FRIDAY’s voice called in his ear, right beside him once again.

“Hey FRI,” Tony said, smug and joyous and chuckling. 

The visor erupted with coded spheres and descriptive data, FRIDAY’s attention weaving through it all. Quick as a sparrow in flight, Tony’s eyes danced across them, processing and filing and understanding. Putting his genius to use.

Tony flexed his fingers, testing the flow of the suit across the complex joints. Perfect. He smiled inside the cave of the helmet and turned, a skyline of blinking light and flashing tech, to look at Strange.

The wizard was watching him, expression smooth, but Tony could see the way his gaze couldn’t stay still. He could see the wonder, set in Strange’s shoulders, as he took in every precise curve and flowing fractal of the Mark 50. 

Tony wanted to dance. He wanted to gather the power of the suit, wanted to harness it himself for the first time since the prototype phase. He wanted Strange to blink, to show those hidden hands, to nod in admission of awe. Tony wanted to show off. 

So he did. 

He pulled the mobile nanites from their homes, sending them into formation across his back. The repulsors purred awake in the center of his palms and along his heels. He felt it when he lifted from the ground, felt it when the suit formed flawlessly into what he asked. He felt like Iron Man. He felt invincible. 

Then he cocked a grin at Strange beneath the helmet, one the man couldn’t see. “Spar with me?”

A blink. A shaking out of hidden hands. A nod. And a smile, curling toward stormy eyes. 

“I thought you’d never ask.”

  
  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll try maybe to keep the next chapter from being 100% banter? 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed!


	105. They Call You a Genius

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So uh I broke my promise
> 
> Enjoy the banter.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_March 2017_ **

 

Stephen beat Stark, the first time they sparred. 

The man held his own for an impressive while against Stephen’s unfamiliar capabilities, but it took less than five minutes to bind him in energy and lower sore hands. Stark’s nanotech cackled upon connection to the magic. Stark had cackled, too. 

And they’d sparred again. 

And again, and again, until FRIDAY had reminded them both of the time and that the monitors and engines needed attention. Stark had bid him farewell and disappeared. His final words had been a light-hearted jeer:  _ “I still say the magic is cheating.” _ Stephen had beat him, even against his Mark 50.

So they sparred again the next day.

And now, five days later, Stephen was rolling beneath a half-powered repulsor blast and wreathing the room in magic. The Cloak had joined, widening the playing field. Stark and Strange fought on all tiers of the room, and their weapons reached long and close. It was a challenge, sparring Iron Man without being able to portal, but as Stark grew more familiar with the capabilities of Stephen’s magic, the sorcerer began to memorize the tells of the versatile nanotech. 

When the nanotech rippled above the hips, it was to be redirected toward the suit’s hands. When it thinned around Stark’s shoulders, it was forming rocket extensions that would burst from his spine to knock Stephen from the air. When the arc reactor pulsed once, more nanites were being deployed to reinforce the suit against bludgeoning or piercing. When it glowed steadily brighter, Stark’s repulsors were changing from flight stabilizers to weapons. 

“You’re still… cheating,” Stark panted as Stephen anticipated the formation of his wings and therefore avoided the sharp curve of the suit to try and catch Stephen off guard. “Put away your crystal ball and fight me properly.”

“I don’t need to view ultimate futures to beat you; you’re just predictable.”

“Predictable?  _ Predictable?  _ You call  _ this _ predictable?” 

A bit of a grin flickered across Stephen’s face as Stark came at him again. He recognized the quote, and went along with it to see if Stark had done it consciously. “Alligators, yes, I was thinking about it on the way over.”

A pause. Stephen took advantage of it, lashing out with a zipping set of Eldritch whips. They wrapped around Stark’s wrists, who yanked hard and fast to send Stephen stumbling and the whips loosening.

“Alligators?” Stark prompted, sounding confused even as he expertly evaded Stephen’s attempt to pin him down. 

“It’s from the movie,” Stephen explained. He leapt forward, winding magic around his palms and sending it—and Stark—flying. 

“What movIE?” Stark’s voice trailed off into a yelp.

“ _ Megamind.”  _ Stephen dropped his mandalas and let his shimmering, immaterial blade fall between his fingers. “Director Tom McGrath, 2010.”

“How—” Stark met it Stephen’s blade with glistening nanotech of his own as he tried to rise— “do you just  _ know  _ these things? I want you on my team for trivia.”

Stephen huffed, spinning around himself to dance out of the way of Stark’s next lunge. “Trivia?  _ That’s  _ the skill you’re focusing on here?” Stephen’s blade elongated, the smokey mist seeming to drip on the edges. He spun forward. Stark ducked aside, barely grazing the flat of the sword. The nanotech thinned around Stark’s shoulders. 

Reading the movement, Stephen was forced to drop the blade in order to conjure his shields. They rose just in time to shatter the explosives bursting from the Iron Man suit. Stephen snuffed them out as soon as the smoke had cleared, ducking forward again. He met Stark’s next blast against a mandala. 

“You’re still cheating.”

Stephen raised his eyebrow. He shoved his arm upward, redirecting the shield and the blast, and ducked beneath it. One good strike of a hastily conjured whip landed against the suit’s hip. Then Stephen was dodging another quick adjustment of the nanotech. 

“This conversation is feeling rather circular.”

“Only because you refuse to admit your tricks.”

“A magician never reveals his secrets,” Stephen quipped, meeting the slitted blue eyes of the suit over a smirk.

“But you’re a sorcerer, as you’re so fond of reminding me.” Stark followed the words with four quick blasts. 

Stephen, unable to dodge one without rolling into another, slammed his hands open. Energy crackled. For a moment, the air before Stephen seemed to fracture. In a blink, the mirage was gone—and so were the lasers.

“Okay,” Stark growled.  _ “What  _ was that?”

Stephen, panting slightly as he readjusted himself to the proper energy, explained breathlessly, “I transported the blasts into the mirror realm, where they couldn’t harm anything.”

“You can  _ do  _ that?” The suit’s face was expressionless, but Stephen could hear the curious, somewhat indignant tone of the man’s voice. He spoke even as he dove for Stephen once again.

“The repulsor shots are forms of energy, aren’t they? If I revalue the energy’s properties and it finds its way to the mirror dimension even without a sling-ring of its own.” Stephen fluttered backward, the Cloak providing him a moment to reorient. 

“Huh.” Stark curled nanotech around his fingers, the nanites lengthening into something like rope. “And a sling-ring is that awkward brass thing you always wear?”

“Yup.” Stephen caught the first whip of nanotech against his blade, conjured once more. “If I get caught without it, I can’t portal, nor shift realms.”

“And here I thought you just had bad fashion sense.”

The nanotech squirmed—instead of ricocheting off the blade as Stephen had anticipated, it wrapped twice around and melted into itself. Stephen faltered for a moment, unable to pull the magic free.

“Careful there,” he warned Stark as he resorted to dissolving his weapon and ducking closer. “You’re dangerously close to insulting my Cloak.”

Stark whipped his hand backward, the nanotech ropes curling like snakes. It was as though the suit had a mind of its own—and of course, made by the father of souls of code, it did. Science so powerful it could be alive. Stephen struck at the chains, hands pulsing with the aura of power, and sent them shying away from his form. The convex angles directed him inward, and Stephen took the opening. 

He shouldn’t have. The moment he redirected his magic, focusing on his offense, Stark reacted. A slant of Iron Man’s mask, a blink of those expressionless eye slits, and the suit was thinning as nanites poured into the growth of those cables. They lengthened, curled. Stephen had already been herded between them.

He spun, trying to fend off a sudden lash of the cords to his left. His attention had split. His defensibility suffered. As magic flashed up to send Stark’s suit and left weapon sprawling, the right curled about his wrist. It looped once; twice. Stephen yanked at the binding, but his right hand and arm were only further immobilized. The hold was secure, but gentle. Stark was careful not to hurt him.

Stephen tried to use the connection of the binding to unbalance the suit as Stark found his feet again. But the nanotech had already disconnected itself, leaving a looping cable to immobilized his arm as the rest returned to Iron Man. Stephen grimaced. He fell back, working at the nanotech with his other hand. He couldn’t grip it, not with his shaking fingers compounded with the lithe immovability of the technology. 

The whirring of the suit’s repulsors gave Stephen just enough time to look up as a blast shattered toward him. He ducked clumsily. 

“Ha!” Stark crowed. “I knew it!”

“What?” Stephen demanded, leaping backward once again. The Cloak gave him a few extra feet.

“Your spells.” Stark somersaulted over him, catching the Cloak in one ruby-red gauntlet. “You can’t cast if you’re hands are bound. They require movement.”

“Not all of them,” Stephen said with a growl, a lopsided mandala flying toward the suit’s reactor. 

“But the useful ones.” Stark sent another coil of tech reaching for Stephen’s other hand. Anticipating the motion from the rippling of the suit, Stephen evaded it. “Damn it.”

“I was wondering when you’d figure it out,” Stephen admitted. He wrenched at the hand forced against his side—Stark was right; without it and the spells he could cast through its motion, he was vulnerable  

“I’ve been hypothesizing for a while.”

Stephen raided an eyebrow even as he clumsily conjured another single-handed mandala. “Oh?”  
“Yeah. When I first met you actually. I was trying to think of ways I could… y’know, if necessary.”

“Lovely,” Stephen huffed, but he found himself unoffended. That had been months ago, and he hadn’t made the  _ best  _ of first impressions…

He felt the Cloak rippling across his shoulder, one of its corners rising upward. Stephen shook his head imperceptibly.  _ Not yet.  _ He could sense the opportune moment; he would wait for it. Like ticking off boxes, Stephen began to choreograph. 

“Good thing it’s not the most terribly obvious of fatal flaws,” Stark hummed. Once again, he struck out. Stephen danced forward, edging closer to the suit, the nanotech hissing as it missed. “Although, you do quite a lot of hand-waving.”

“I prefer to think of it as conducting,” Stephen panted. He managed to avoid another blast, barely catching it on a fraying mandala. The energy was clumsily directed—casting with one hand was like trying to write with his non-dominant side. 

Or just, writing in general…

“Conducting what? Rather excited frogs?” Stark scoffed. Stephen was a few feet closer now. The ropes of nanotech were faster and more agile nearer to the suit, but Stephen could hardly risk anything else. 

“Butterflies,” Stephen corrected.

“Butterflies don’t make noise.”

Stephen regarded him flatly. “Now I can see why they call you a genius.”

Stark huffed something between amusement and annoyance, and in that moment, Stephen pounced. He jerked his chin, lunging forward, and the Cloak took its signal. It had been slipping beneath the coils of the nanotech binding Stephen’s hand, just smooth enough to slide against the vibranium particles. It flared outward. Stephen yanked his wrist free, wincing as the pins ground against his bones slightly. He’d been anticipating it, so the twinge of pain didn’t slow him, and Stephen threw his magic into action at a Stark still speaking.

Nanotech flashed, but Stephen had already sent his Eldritch whip sparking along the floor. Stark’s blast went wide as he lost his balance. He recovered quickly, suit reforming to meet Stephen’s next attack. Striking at Stark’s wrists, hard, Stephen put excess power into the spell. It was bad form and a waste of energy, but the shock wave of energy was undirected and disconcerting. Stephen gritted his teeth against it.

The wave of formless energy did its intended job. Acting as a new signal enveloping the nanotech, the magic blocked Stark’s orders for just a single, clumsy moment.

All Stephen needed was that moment. He wound his wrists, gesturing to conjure, and a blade fell into his hands even as he stepped forward. A broadsword, heavy even in its immaterial, Stephen plunged the weapon toward the arc reactor in the heart of the suit.

Stark inhaled sharply. 

When the tip of the blade was grazing the reactor’s surface, Stephen stopped. He was breathing hard from the quick movement and undirected magic, but he met the expressionless slits of the helmet and smirked.

“I win,” he purred, and stepped back. “Again.”

With a fizzle of nanotech, Stark’s helmet disappeared. Unimpressed caramel eyes regarded Stephen, before Stark sighed and raised his hands in yield.

“Damn it,” the engineer cursed, though there was a slant to his lips and shoulders that said he was more satisfied than frustrated. “Thought I had you that time.”

“Nearly,” Stephen agreed. He let the blade drop away into a dramatic fizzle of smokey energy, and Stark tapped twice at the light in his chest to fold back his suit. Stephen couldn’t help but pause his own movements to watch. The way the suit recoiled effortlessly, like liquid gold, was downright impressive. 

“My confidence in you has been restored.” Stark patted his shoulder condescendingly, and Stephen snorted.

“Uh-huh. Glad to hear it.”

“I’ll get you tomorrow.”

Something twinged in Stephen’s chest, but he quipped, “That’s what you said yesterday.”

Stark glowered at him without responding, and Stephen hid his grin. Speechless meant another point for the sorcerer. 

He had to continue, however: “But we can’t fight again tomorrow.” 

Stark blinked at him, brow furrowing. “Why not?”

“We can’t… make a routine out of it,” Stephen explained, then winced. That hadn’t come out right. “Sorry, that’s not what I mean. We can’t—we can’t do the same thing everyday, or it will get… boring,” he finished lamely. 

“Boring.” Stark gave him a look that told Stephen he was not buying this. 

“At least… let’s at least do it at a different time. In the evening instead. Or early morning.”

“Alright,” Stark conceded, sounding baffled, but not irritated. Stephen took what he could get.

He wandered back over to the far wall where he’d left his thermos, repositioning the Eye of Agamotto at his sternum—it had been twisted on its chain in their spar. Wearing the Stone during combat, even friendly, was risky, but Stephen was far from comfortable with leaving the amulet just lying around. Not that he was overly comfortable wearing it, either.

Stephen had spent quite a lot of time in the sparring center since takeoff, and not just because of Stark. His multiversal location was changing so quickly that trying to direct alien energies to his own moving location required a different process. Stephen’s instinct had been to push energy to an area around him, to portal and to manipulate his environment in relation to himself instead of himself in relation to his environment. But on the ship, he’d already flown passed the location where his magic rippled into existence. He needed to get used to that, and to find away around it. 

He was proud of what had resulted. Though his aim was slightly skewed and his speed minimally impaired, he could focus his magic relative to his own body instead of the universe around him. Less specific, but convenient. And as far as effectiveness went, it was almost identical.

Days on end within the training hall, alone and unwatched—the perfect time to remember the cinnamon taste of his greatest weapon. But Stephen had yet to open the Eye. Yet to truly look at it.

_ I’ve come… I’ve come to bargain…  _

He could still remember the blindingness of that green shade. If he locked Eyes again, he wasn’t sure he’d ever see anything else. 

Stephen shook his head and turned his attention away from the weight on his chest. Bracing the mouth of the thermos against his lip, he managed a long drink without splashing any illegally conjured tea across his front. The satisfying weariness of exertion pulled pleasantly on his limbs. Stark eyed him, then trotted over to brace a hand against the wall for balance as he stretched his quadriceps.

“What was that at the end?” Stark wondered after a moment.

“What?”

“The moment when you hijacked the suit.”

“Oh.” Stephen swallowed his mouthful and used his chin to flip the lid of the thermos. “I didn’t. It was simply an imprecise spell; I purposefully drew clumsy magic so there would be an excess of it that would interfere with your electrical signals for a moment.”

“Clumsy?”

Stephen nodded. “Usually, it’s a waste of magic and your own energy to do so.”

“Well.” Stark switched legs, stretching the other side. “I’ll have to find a way to get around that so called ‘waste.’”

Stephen grinned. “Ten dollars says I still win tomorrow.”

Stark slapped him, rolling his eyes. “Do you even have any money?”

A pause. “Well… I have brass stamped coins.”

“That’s what I thought.” Stark chuckled, shaking out his wrists. “Ten hypothetical brass stamped coins says I can beat you at chess, regardless of whether or not I can best a wizard in a sparring match.”

“Prove it,” Stephen said, lifting his chin. He knew full well the  _ Beyond  _ lacked a chess set. 

“Fine.” Stark smirked, striding off across the room.

Stephen frowned. He glanced at the collar of the Cloak, which shrugged bemusedly. Fumbling with the thermos for a moment, Stephen followed the retreating billionaire somewhat clumsily. The Cloak was still lifting him slightly, anticipating the next attack; it took them both a moment to fall back into their civilian airs. 

Instead of having to venture into the cockpit as he’d had expected, Stephen found Stark lingering at the bottom of the ladder. A moment later, he saw little Parker beside him. The boy glanced up, meeting Stephen’s gaze with excitement and waved almost aggressively. 

“Hey, Doctor Strange!” he called. 

Stephen leapt the last few rungs to land beside them. He kept his balance well, even without the help of the Cloak. “Hi.”

“Dumbledore and I are settling a bet,” Stark explained, jerking a thumb in Stephen’s direction. “Want to help?”

Peter grinned somewhat wickedly. “Oh, yes! What are the terms?”

“Me winning a game of chess, for hypothetical money.”

Peter looked slightly disappointed. “Oh.”

Rolling his eyes, Stark threw an arm over the boy’s shoulder and hauled him toward the cockpit. Stephen followed slightly behind, smiling a bit at the nonchalance flowing between the two.

“The good doctor doesn’t actually have any money,” Stark explained in a very loud, very fake conspiratorial whisper. “But his pride is easily bruised about it.”

Stephen rolled his eyes, but he couldn’t exactly object. 

“Do you actually have a chess set?” Peter replied, in a far truer whisper. 

“Not yet,” Stark said. “But I will.”

The lights of the cockpit sprang to life as soon as they’d crossed the threshold, and Stephen cast his gaze around the place. He hadn’t been in here since they’d taken off; Stark had reorganized quite extensively. The data crawled from screen to screen in comprehensive strands, and the curling wires were wound around table legs and tucked out of the way. Controlling docks and navigational portals had relocated to their appropriate sections. And Stark, plopping down in a wheeling chair in the center of all of it, looked completely at home. 

“Welcome to my humble abode,” he said, turning his attention to Stephen. “Don’t touch anything.”

“Wasn’t planning on it,” Stephen replied. “I prefer to not be set on fire.”

“Careful there, wizard. Any of this bursts into flame and we’re dead in six seconds.”

“Oh, we could make it seven at least.”

“Do you have to argue with  _ everything  _ I say?”

Stephen smirked. “Yes.”

“Alright, you two,” Peter interrupted. “I didn’t sign up for bickering.”

“Right, you’re here for the chess tournament of the century!” Stark unceremoniously brushed the screens off the desk in front of him and gestured for Stephen to sit. Making sure to look as long-suffering as possible, Stephen ambled across the room to perch on the other side of the table. 

Stark looked at him expectantly.

Raising an eyebrow, Stephen waited.

“So?” Stark gestured pointedly to the empty space between them.

“I thought you were challenging me to an actual game,” Stephen huffed. 

“I was. You can conjure ingestible tea; I don’t think for a _ second  _ that you can’t make us a chess set.”

Stephen blinked. He hadn’t realized Stark had noticed. “You… are alright with that?”

“What, scared I’ll win?”

Stark was smiling, challenge flashing across that world-recognized, lethally handsome grin. Stephen looked for any sign of trauma in the man, any sign of discomfort, ready to make an excuse if necessary. But there was nothing, just the slightest curl of determination beyond just a chess challenge.

So Stephen nodded and closed his eyes. His hands began to wind around themselves almost before he began truly casting, twisting out the design he sought to create. 

Then he paused, one eye cracking open slightly. He  _ should  _ draw energy from a nearby realm and pass it into the physical energy level of this dimension, forcing the particles into something solid, but… 

Stephen let his eye flutter closed again and reached his Mystic perception further, much further, chasing a dimension he remembered quite clearly. The energy came easily, recognizing him clearer than alien dimensions. He’d been to this world, after all. He’d left his blood within it. 

When Stephen opened his eyes again, a eight by eight grid of white and black had folded itself across the desk. And atop it sat thirty-two creatures, each beautifully formed from heavy ebony or pale pinewood. The white pieces spread shining wings, tongues flicking from canine maws in eyeless skulls. The Blacks were feline and familiar, lacking ears, carved with their mouths cracked open in roars Stephen could remember quite well.

Across from him, Peter goggled. The boy extended a hand, brushing against the pieces like they were something ancient and precious. Each was unique, with its own personality imbued into the stance and expression of the figure. Stephen could pick out the Black Bishop that had tried so hard to kill him those months ago.

Stark leaned forward, narrowing his eyes at the chess set. He stayed that way for a long moment, before sitting back and glaring at Stephen.

“Fucking show off.”

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chess world makes a cameo. And I was in the mood for Stephen being badass so that's what we got. XD
> 
> Sorry I'm late by the way! Long week. Hope you enjoyed, and more coming soon!


	106. Professional Putty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Welcome back to the shenanigans.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_March 2017_ **

 

Looking back, it was probably asking for trouble. But Peter and Loki hadn’t gone down to the galley  _ primarily  _ to start throwing knives around. 

They’d been hungry, and Peter had dragged Loki down to rehydrate some rations for what could have been lunch, had there been the passage of time to indicate it. Loki grumbled of course, but his stomach was louder, and so they’d ended up eating without too much fuss. Where they’d went wrong was the location. Usually, Peter preferred eating up near the top of the ship, but Loki insisted they stayed down near the water so he could gulp it dramatically whenever the slimy ration taste became too much for him. 

So they were still sitting there when Romanoff and Rogers ambled into the galley. Well, Loki was sitting; Peter was clinging upside-down to the vibranium paneled roof. 

“See,” he was saying, “they look like snakes. That’s why they get scared.”

Loki wrinkled his nose. “Cucumbers do not look like snakes,” he drawled. “And such a dignified creature as the feline would not mistake it as such.”

Peter laughed. “You can’t haggle facts, Loki. Turn yourself into one and I’ll find us a cucumber. We can test—”

He broke off, head craning owlishly as he noticed the two newcomers in the doorway. Awkwardly, he waved. “Oh. Hello.”

“Hello Parker,” Romanoff said, giving him a grin. “Loki.”

“Greetings.”

Rogers made his way over to one of the cupboards, rifling around in it for one of their sawdust energy bars. Unsticking slowly, Peter folded himself back down to the floor to stand next to Loki. He munched quietly, but the noise was still deafening in the now-silent room. Embarrassed, Peter stopped chewing. 

Romanoff glanced at them after a few moments, raising her eyebrows. “What?” she said. “We aren’t going to light you on fire.”

“Um,” Peter coughed.

Loki eyed the food in his hands, giving a long-suffering sigh. “I rather think you should. It would be far preferable to the torture of this tasteless substance.”

Rolling his eyes, Peter relaxed a little. “He’s being dramatic,” he explained. “Ignore him.”

“ _ That  _ I would not recommend,” Loki said, voice going from whining to lethally sharp quite capriciously.

“Ignoring you? Hardly,” Rogers added from where he’d half folded himself in the cupboard. There was a lighter-colored bar at his knees, but he didn’t seem satisfied with it, rifling around until he found a different one. 

Peter cocked his head. “Do you not like the light ones?” Loki had told him they all tasted the same to him, but Peter’s enhanced senses could pick out a slight variety. Perhaps the super-soldier was the same way. Either way, it felt like useful information. 

“Hm?” Rogers wondered. He followed Peter’s gaze to the energy bar and shrugged. “Oh, no they’re fine. But the light ones are Strange’s favorite, I’m pretty sure.”

Peter blinked. “Are they?”

“I guess. They’re the only ones I see him eating.”

“Oh.” Peter imagined the sarcastic wizard sitting with his knees tucked around his thermos in the corner, glaring at them over a light-colored ration bar, and grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Rogers moved back toward Romanoff, handing her a block of food and settling against one of the walls. He looked mostly comfortable, aside from a slight tension in his shoulders as he regarded Peter and Loki. As his ice-blue eyes took Peter in, the boy felt the itching need to break that evaluative gaze, to prove he didn’t need it.

Loki, however, was unimpressed. “If you have something to say,” he began, cleaning under his fingernails with his knife—when had he manifested that?— “just ask.”

“I was waiting for the spider-boy, actually,” Rogers said with a sigh. 

Peter frowned. “Did I…”

“You have questions. Or at least things to say.”

“Do I?”

Romanoff’s eyebrows crept higher. “Don’t you?”

A pause, as all four of them glanced among themselves. Loki looked as baffled as Peter felt. Because he didn’t have anything to say; Peter didn’t know the story behind Rogers, and he definitely didn’t know the one behind Romanoff. All he knew was that Tony had needed him on his side, both in Germany and that day when he’d called from Wakanda and sounded so shaken. And so Peter was on his side, without question, without a need for explanation. 

He’d never been fighting for or against the Accords—maybe he should have been, maybe he should’ve wanted to understand the perspectives in that case, but he was never fighting for the Accords. He was always fighting for Tony. Even in Germany. 

So he didn’t have anything to say to Rogers or Romanoff now, nothing that was his place to say and nothing that was his place to ask. Because Peter didn’t need to know, not if Tony hadn’t needed to tell him. He was happy to help, whether he understood the entirety of the history or not. He wasn’t all that curious, either, to his own surprise. 

Peter looked at Rogers and shrugged. “I don’t,” he said. “Sorry.”

The soldier blinked. Looked at Romanoff beside him. “Alright,” he replied softly. 

Peter offered a smile—it felt weird, pointed at Rogers. But it wouldn’t hurt to at least be friendly, since Peter would probably be placing his life in the Captain’s hands rather soon. “Actually, I do have one thing. Don’t call me spider-boy.”

Romanoff chuckled. “Oh?”

“It’s Spider-Man; only Loki calls me anything else. And Mr. Stark. But he calls everybody everything but their actual names as I’m sure you’re aware. I’m Peter. Peter Parker.” 

“How did that become Spider-Man?” Rogers asked. “I’m a little curious.”

“I got bitten by a radioactive spider,” Peter explained with a shrug. “Stuff happened, I made myself some web-shooters and got to work, and then Mr. Stark found me. The rest is history.”

“Not to us,” Romanoff said. “Shocking as it may be, I know almost nothing about you. Stark’s been viciously working to keep you off the internet, although he missed one YouTube channel.”

_ Ah.  _ Peter blushed, and Loki gave him a look. 

“Well…” Peter coughed. “He’s been trying to keep me safe for longer than I’ve known him, I think. And if even the Widow couldn’t find me out, he’s been doing a damn good job.”

Romanoff nodded, bringing up her hands in an exaggerated shrug. “Even SHIELD didn’t have anything on you. Though we weren’t exactly in good shape at that time.”

“History on both sides,” Peter agreed. 

Loki tossed his knife, catching it deftly in that way he did when he was thinking. “Do you know what he can do?” he asked.

It was Rogers who replied, “I’d like to. Since I’ll be fighting alongside him—both of you—it wouldn’t hurt if… if we had no more secrets.”

The words were heavy, a sigh hidden behind them and a regret that Peter could only guess at. Rogers took a bite out of his energy bar, chewing it slowly. He watched it with memory-laden eyes, and Peter wondered what these two had been doing in the month they’d been trapped within the  _ Beyond’s  _ walls. He hadn’t seen them much. 

Perhaps that was for the best. Or perhaps not. Perhaps it didn’t have to be.

Peter said, “I’m really strong. I stick to things—like you saw when I was on the roof.” He snatched Loki’s knife out of the air, tossing it between his own fingers for a moment. “Um… I’m fast and agile, and my webbing is super adhesive and practically unbreakable from applied force—kind of like silly putty. But more like… professional putty.”

Loki snorted.

“So yeah. I fight that way, through the capabilities of my web-shooters and my own agility. I’m better in urban environments, obviously, but I do alright in closed spaces or wide-open landscapes, too.”

“Noted,” Rogers hummed, nodding appraisingly. His gaze was slightly unfocused as he evaluated the provided information, filing it into his strategy. Like a general, like a soldier, like a captain. 

“And you are mostly aware of what I am capable of,” Loki added. “Magic, shape-shifting, illusions. And of course, combat.” He snatched his knife back from Peter in the same motion he hurled it, precisely and smoothly, across the room toward the space next to Rogers’s shoulder. 

And the Black Widow plucked it out of the air. 

Silence rang for a moment. Romanoff spun the knife across her palm, peering at the inlay on the blade. It was Asgardian for Loki’s name—Peter knew what it said only because he and FRIDAY had been spying when they were procrastinating one of their lessons. The hilt was a bit large for Romanoff’s palm, but the blade was as sharp and wicked as her fingers. 

Twirling it over her wrist, into her other hand, and back across the room, Romanoff nodded approvingly. “Good arm,” she told Loki as he caught the knife again.

“Mm,” the god grunted, peering at her. Then, without warning and quick as a cobra, he hurled the knife again. This time, it spun directly toward her, closely followed by his second blade. 

Rogers had just enough time to spring to his feet, face twisting into something defensive and resolute. But Romanoff evaded Loki’s first attack, letting the knife strike the vibranium with an even, harmonious note, and caught the second blade just as easily. She was smiling.

“Relax, Steve,” she told the Captain. “He’s not trying to hurt us.”

Rogers glared at Loki, who grinned at him irreverently. Peter hid his chuckle; the Captain’s reaction wasn’t unwarranted, but it was definitely funny. 

At Romanoff’s feet, Loki’s knife flickered and disappeared in a haze of green light. Moments later, it was in his hand again. He tossed it to Romanoff, less aggressively this time, and she did the same simultaneously. 

They traded knives that way a few times, before Romanoff reached down between one throw and the next to pull out a blade of her own. It was smaller than Loki’s, but serrated on its edge, and it flashed in the galley’s incandescents as the assassin added it to the weapons flying at high speeds through the room. Loki just bit his lip in concentration. Timing his hands to the arcs of the knives, Loki caught two by their handles. From Peter’s slightly terrified perspective, it looked like they were juggling. 

He and Rogers shared a glance.  _ ‘Is this normal?’  _ the captain mouthed. 

“Hell if I know,” Peter hissed.

Loki slid his eyes to Peter—now catching lethal weapons without looking. Peter refused to make eye contact. 

Laughing, Loki stopped the cycle by failing to throw one of the blades, ending up with all three balanced between his fingers. He flipped one so the hilt was offered toward Peter. 

Slightly suspiciously, Peter picked it up. He was used to the weight and balance of Loki’s Asgardian knives, so the weapon felt familiar in his grip. It was warm. He wondered if that was because of the hands that had been holding it, or because Loki was happy. 

“Don’t laugh at me,” he warned, then curled his wrist back and awkwardly chucked the knife across the room.

Loki obeyed, though Peter thought he heard him desperately staunch a splutter. Peter glared at him. Loki sounded a bit choked as he lied, “I’m not laughing.”

Romanoff, smiling, bent to pick up the knife. “Well, I’ll just say you’re far more suited to Cap’s shield at the moment. Don’t throw a blade like a frisbee; that’s not gonna work out for you.”

Rogers rolled his eyes. “And don’t throw my shield like a frisbee either. It isn’t one, contrary to  _ popular belief. _ ”

Romanoff grinned provocatively at the man. He shoved at her shoulder, smiling a bit, and sat back down with his food.

“Anyway,” Loki took over, dissolving and re-materializing his knife so he could hand it to Peter, “you want to give it an overhand spin, so it travels on a vertical plane.”

“Okay…” Peter said doubtfully.

“Raise it up to your shoulder,” Romanoff instructed. “Yeah, like that.”

“Now extend your wrist, keeping your thumb parallel to your radius,” Loki continued.

“And let go sharply, without twisting your arm, so the blade flies straight.”

Peter did as he was bit, his tongue creeping out to stick between his lips in concentration. The knife went flying—not far, but with a half-spin and at least a bit of direction to it. Peter huffed, glaring at where it had fallen with a clatter to the floor. 

“That was better,” Romanoff told him. 

Loki re-materialized the knife. “Again?”

* * *

“Boss?” 

FRIDAY’s voice broke through Tony’s wafer-light dose, jerking him fully awake in an instant. “What is it?” he demanded, knowing FRIDAY wouldn’t rouse him from his rare naps without reason. 

“Well…” The ship hummed in FRIDAY’s confusion, and Tony glanced up at the camera in the corner.

“Well? Is it good or bad?”

“Not sure, boss,” FRIDAY replied. “Loki, Peter, Romanoff, and Rogers are throwing knives at each other in the galley.”

Tony was on his feet between one blink and the next, already striding toward the door. His footsteps echoed. “How could that  _ possibly be good? _ ” he yelped, reaching for the panel that would send him sliding out into the hall.

“Well, because they’re smiling, boss.”

That gave Tony pause. “What?”

“It doesn’t look like they’re attacking each other.”

Tony frowned, rocking back onto his heels. “But they’re throwing  _ knives  _ around?”

“Yes. Loki’s knives, and one of the Widow’s now.”

“Peter?”

FRIDAY flashed “Seems to be making snarky comments in the background.”

Peter would be making snarky comments regardless of whether or not he was currently engaged in a knife fight, so that gave Tony little confidence. What did dissolve his concern was FRIDAY’s demeanor, and her description of the emotion. Smiles, with Peter’s commentary in the  _ background.  _ Tony stepped back from the door.

“Do they look like they’re liable to die in the next few minutes?”

“Always a possibility with those four, boss.”

Tony smirked, running a tired hand through his hair. It stuck up around his fingers. “Well, lets give them the benefit of the doubt then. I’m going back to sleep.”

And with that, he wandered back to the front of the cockpit, sat down, and closed his eyes again. 

  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> KNIVES


	107. The Way Things Are

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 300K EVERYBODY!!!! 🎉🎈🎉!!! I'm so excited I figured out how to insert emojis on a laptop. That's a big number, even with my tragic inability to be concise... XD. Thank you all for sticking with me this long; I hope you've enjoyed the ride so far, and I hope you're excited for what's in store!
> 
> Without further ado, chapter 107.

 

**Earth-200004:** **_March 2017_ **

 

Loki lay on his back on the cot in his quaint room, one hand curled insouciantly to pillow his head and the other playing the hilt of his knife. He tossed it, trying to get three twirls in before catching it with nimble fingers. The cot squeaked beneath the movements. 

His room was an interesting amalgam of angles and edges and walls and hollows and curves, tucked into the narrowed hollow space of the wing-like structures built into the  _ Beyond.  _ It was comfortable yet strange, so Loki preferred to spend most of his free time elsewhere. Namely, Peter’s room. But it was late, and the boy was working with FRIDAY on something boring and algebraic, last Loki checked. And Romanoff was asleep, somewhat unpredictably. It was easy to get off-rhythm without the cycle of the sun. Loki supposed, in that case, it couldn’t really be considered ‘late’, either. 

Loki was not asleep. He had, in fact, just woken up from a nap of unknown length, and was enjoying listening to the purring of the ever-accelerating engine. The core was working without a hitch, propelling them smoothly and consistently as Strange’s magic curled around the ship to bend space-time. Loki wished he could see it, the bend; perhaps he’d understand how it worked if he did. 

Yawning, Loki dematerialized his knife and sat up, accompanied by the creak of bed springs. He bounced a few more times, trying out the notes of the metal, then huffed and stood completely. His weight still felt just slightly off. The artificial gravity was just noticeably lighter than that of Earth. 

Music warbled softly in the background of his thoughts. Stark was still awake, then, unsurprisingly. He tended to enjoy intensely different styles of music than Loki did; louder sounds with stronger rhythms and faster lyrics. Loki didn’t  _ dislike  _ Stark’s music, not really, but he preferred the style he’d picked and chosen out of Peter’s library much better. 

Unfortunately, there were a limited number of those. And after almost two months consumed in the heart of a spaceship, the inhabitants wanted a little variety. 

Loki hummed, ignoring the tune around him, and slipped out of his room. His feet shuffled lightly against the metal surface, and Loki glanced disapprovingly at them. He wasn’t in the mood for noise. Perhaps he could make it to the cockpit to silence the music before Stark noticed. 

Loki closed his eyes for an instant, reaching down into the depths of his perception for his magic. Between one step and the next, he slipped like a shadow out of his humanoid form and skipped his next stride as a raven. Fluttering onyx wings, Loki let out a quiet  _ caw.  _ It echoed. He cawed again, a bit louder, and took off. 

The halls of the ship were low, but that wasn’t what threw Loki off as he attempted to catch air within the ship. He felt perpetually as though he was about to tuck his wings to dive, just by the nature of the gravity that tugged at him. It was bizarre; Loki wondered if he could find the perfect angle to just orbit the circular path of the ship without flapping once, letting the air pressure and the gravitational pull do the work for him. 

So, naturally, he set about trying to find out. 

Loki whistled past rooms and viewports, half flying, half falling. He’d gone a significant distance when the tables abruptly turned; something went whistling past him. 

It was a door, zipping open as someone moved to step out. They quickly retracted their steps as Loki plunged by them, a hair’s breadth from having their nose sliced off by a curious bird. Loki slammed his wings open, curling his pinions to stop himself. He strained to turn without banking into one of the near walls. The hallway was too narrow, however, so Loki was forced to land and turn in skipping hops back toward the door.

It was not Peter who emerged, unfortunately. It was Strange, his face amused, his Cloak’s collar cocked with interest, and his hands tucked behind himself. Loki’s eyes vision blurred slightly when he focused on the wizard, who seemed in a good mood. At least, Strange didn’t look ready to antagonize anyone... which was rather disappointing, actually.

Loki cocked his sleek black head and tried to blink away the fuzziness of his gaze. It remained. Loki would have frowned, but as it was he could only puff up the feathers on his chest.

Strange, locating where he'd landed, took a couple of steps down the hall. The blurriness moved with him—no, it  _ was  _ him. Loki’s feathers puffed ever further. 

Strange raised an eyebrow. “I’m assuming you’re Loki, then,” he said.

Loki squawked, loudly, and the sorcerer grimaced, raising a hand to rub his ear. “That’s rather piercing,” he observed. “If you could quiet down?” 

“Are you casting a spell?” Loki wondered by way of reply.

Strange shrugged. “Nothing ongoing, no. Though I couldn’t say the same for you.”

Loki ignored the last comment and hopped a bit closer, wings zipping out to steady himself. He pecked at Strange’s ankle, trying to grip the aura that blurred around him. Instead, he caught a chunk of the sorcerer’s sock and the skin of his ankle.

“Hey!” Strange huffed, kicking him back. Indignantly, Loki squawked again.

“Do not push me,” he ordered. “I’m investigating.”

The eyebrow made its way up and off the sorcerer’s face.  _ “Oh?” _

“You are blurry,” Loki explained. “Haloed. I know not why.”

Strange frowned and looked down at himself, then shared a shrug with his Cloak and turned his attention back to Loki. The amulet around his neck flashed. “I haven’t made my aura visible.”

Loki circled him once on his feet, claws clicking against the metal of the  _ Beyond’s  _ floor, then fluttered up to perch on Strange’s shoulder. The wizard strained his neck to try to put as much distance between his eye and Loki’s beak as possible. Loki entertained the possibility of pecking him again before thinking better of it. 

He was enveloped by the strange blurriness, now, and it pooled against his glossy feathers as though the wizard was physically exuding light. Loki lowered his head until he was almost touching the Cloak, trying to distinguish something within it.

“Ah!” Strange exclaimed, with a sudden, jarring shrug. Loki lost his balance and went screeching back to the floor of the hall. He glowered up at Strange. 

“Sorry,” the sorcerer said. He didn’t sound sorry. “I think I get it.”

Loki didn’t prompt him; he was sure the wizard would be gifting him with his hypothesis anyway. 

“You’re a raven, right?”

“Obviously,” Loki crowed. 

“You can see UV in the electromagnetic spectrum,” Strange explained. “I’m probably emitting some faint radiation; it’s a side effect of the Mystic Arts. Like friction is for movement.”

Loki ruffled his feathers again. “What?”

“You’re seeing an extra color.” Strange gestured to himself, looking a bit excited. “I wonder if there’s a spell to increase perception in that way… there are a thousand colors we humans can’t see. I wonder if I’d be able to remember them once I saw them.”

Loki lifted one of his feet, peering around the ship. Now that Strange mentioned it, he could see the shadows a bit more clearly, could see slight blurriness around the lights and curling in through the windows.  _ Interesting.  _

“What other creatures can see these lights?” Loki wondered. 

“Well…” Strange knelt before him, eyes unfocused as he thought. “There are many creatures that see in different spectrums. Insects and the like. There’s a kind of shrimp that can see far more colors than us, ones we can’t even imagine existing. It’s probably not a good idea to shift into a deep-sea animal in this pressure system, however.”

“No,” Loki mused. “I know not the look of this animal, either, so shifting would be impossible.” 

Strange blinked, refocusing in on Loki. He looked intrigued—looked calculating. “How does it work?” he asked.

“What?”

“Your shape-shifting. How does it work?”

Loki fluttered one wing, straightening the flight feathers, and huffed. “I already told you.”

“Well, yes, but that was in regards to your general magic. And I was angry at the time.”

Loki pecked at him again. “And you aren’t angry now?”

Strange batted him away, standing. “Stark is playing my song of the day,” he said, as if it made any sense.

Loki peered at him. “Song of the day?”

Waving a hand dismissively, Strange said, “don’t worry about it.”

“I didn’t intend to.” He hopped a bit further down the hallway, and the sorcerer followed him. Loki slid his head back over his shoulder to glare at him.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Strange pressed. “I wonder about your skin-changing; where do you get the extra mass, or store it when you become a smaller creature?”

Rolling avian eyes, Loki spread his wings and leapt, morphing back into his humanoid form. It was quicker than a blink, and he reached down to straighten his tunic before turning back to Strange. The sorcerer was looking at him as though he was a puzzle to be solved, an enigma to be understood. 

It was almost flattering, actually. 

Loki crossed his arms, leaning against the wall. “Like I said before,” he grunted, “I manipulate the shape of the space around me in a specific scale. When working with my own form, it’s at the scale of my makeup.”

“A cellular one,” Strange agreed.

“Sure.” Loki lifted a hand, reaching out toward the form of the air before him. He wrenched it, coaxed it, and in a shiver of greenish energy, his knife fell into his hand.

“Atomic scale.” Strange reached out with a shaking hand, as if to touch the blade. Loki saw the spidering of scars tracing his bones, so much more obvious now that he was closer. He bit his tongue to keep from commenting on them. 

“My shape-shifting is simply me deciding which parts of me are going to take which form,” Loki continued. “If I am to take a smaller form, I release my unnecessary matter into the negative space around me. If I am to take a larger form, I draw from that space.”

Strange frowned, though his eyes sparked with excitement. For a moment, Loki forgot how cold this individual had always been, presented with a fellow magician trying to understand his trade.

“But doesn’t it harm you?” he asked. “How do you know which particles to draw back into your human form when you shift? What if you move away from where you originally changed—haven’t you left your matter behind?”

Loki’s brow furrowed. “I don’t understand. Why would that be a problem?”

“Well… because you want to maintain your own particles, don’t you? You just shove particles between their forms and states; if you loose track of the particles you released or absorbed, you’d be made of completely different matter than when you were born.”

“So?”

Strange blinked. “What?”

Loki was beginning to think there was a schism here; something he wasn’t understanding. “Why would it make a difference if your particles shifted?”

“Well, because…” Strange was staring at him, looking similarly confused. “Because then you wouldn’t be  _ you  _ anymore.”

Loki laughed. “What do you mean? This universe belongs to me, and I belong to it; why would the makeup of my form change anything? You imply the other forms I can take are alien ones, not my true shape, which is frankly ridiculous. Just because my arm is created by the air that used to be around my raven’s wing doesn’t make it any less  _ my  _ arm. And just because my knife derived from different matter each time I manifest it doesn’t make it any less my knife.”

Strange nodded slowly, gaze raking in the knife and the arm Loki was indicating. “I suppose that makes sense,” he said. “I never considered it… quite like that.”

* * *

_ This universe belongs to me, and I belong to it. _

The precise and limitless power of Loki’s Asgardian magic was like nothing Stephen had ever heard of. Such widespread change, changing the very  _ essence  _ of the universe around him, was unheard of within the dimensional nature of the Mystic Arts. Stephen could conjure and manifest, but that was a gift of the energy of specific dimensions mingling, not because of an inherent ability to manipulate it. 

Where Stephen called alien powers, Loki worked with the basic layers of their own world. Where Stephen moved energy and potentiality and let reaction do the rest, Loki forced change into physical substances. It was amazing. 

“So… what other capabilities do you have?” Stephen prodded. He’d long since given up trying to hide his excitement. It felt good to be distracted from the weight on his chest. 

“Telekinesis,” Loki began, tapping his chin with the flat of his knife. “Illusion—I cannot create life out of what had no life before, but I can create a mask of it, or an illusion.”

Stephen took a skipping step down the hall; he wanted to move, to think this through, to understand. “Fascinating,” he said as Loki matched his strides. “Illusions are a staple of the Mystic Arts, as well, though I tend to focus elsewhere.”

“How do you conjure such, then?” Loki wondered. “With your dimensional energy, I mean?”

Stephen, with the questioning turned back on him, immediately fell into the demeanor he used with his novices, the one he’d cultivated from the Ancient One. It was a familiar, practiced mask for him to slip beneath, despite how long it had been since he’d taught. 

He missed the Sanctum. Wong. Even his novices, in moments like this. 

“I pull energy from a specific position in the multiverse, space-time coordinates directing me to a portion of energy that will react to ours in the way that I require. For an illusion, I draw from the astral plane of the appropriate world—which is far more energetic.”

Loki glanced at him. “Oh?”

“Yes. Dimensions take different forms—called ‘planes’—depending on the energy level they exist in at any given instant. This shift in instantaneous energy level creates a fourth axis of our multiverse—which I refer to as ‘form’. The astral plane is a sort of shadow made by the variation of a dimension who’s energy spends most of its time in a state of less movement. And when I say ‘most of its time’ I mean all but an infinitesimal percentage. But that’s enough to layer forms to create the separate astral plane.”

They’d reached the far edge of the ship, and the hallway broke into the cockpit in front of them and the shaft that lead up and sideways toward the sparring center. Pausing for a moment in the slightly larger space, they eventually made their way up and into the sprawling, curving cavern above them. Glancing at Loki, Stephen lingered by the edge of the training center’s wall. Loki joined him, and they leaned comfortably against the silvery surface and spoke as if to a room full of listeners. 

“Are there planes on an energy level beneath the ‘average’?” Loki wondered. He was looking around as though he’d be able to distinguish the shadow of another dimension around them. 

Snorting, Stephen nodded. “Of course. There are no lower planes for our dimension though, as we are already in our lowest, most condensed, slowest form.”

“Should I take insult?” 

“It’s not offensive,” Stephen huffed. “It’s simply the way things are.”

“Hm. So there are lower planes for other worlds?”

“Yes. They’re a strange experience; places where the time axis warps to move faster. It’s the opposite for an astral plane, where each moment is drawn out into a thousand.”

“That could be rather convenient, in a pinch,” Loki hummed.

Stephen thought of books cracked open before his meditating form for hours-turned-days. He thought of the sensation of dimensions slipping like eels across his shoulders. He thought of lightning sparking in fractals like neurons across the night sky, ‘ _ just so I can watch the snow’,  _ and a hand in his that disappeared between his heartbeats. 

Grunting noncommittally, Stephen turned his attention to a shaking hand. He lifted it before him, spreading it as flat as he could manage, and concentrated. Carving a sliver in the fabric of reality before him, he spread magic out into the air. It sparked, then tickled. Stephen turned his hand over, offering his misshapen knuckle for the small, russet butterfly that shimmered into existence.

It glowed softly, and the light gleamed within Loki’s dark eyes. The god cocked his head, sharp and predatory, and Stephen waited, not daring to blink. For it only took an instant; one snap, and another butterfly was hovering before him. 

Loki stuck to his trademark, taking the form of a deep, emerald green creature with elegant black patterns atop his wings. His antennae curled in a way no Earthen insect’s would, but Stephen supposed Loki was allowed creative liberties. 

He sent his butterfly into movement, wings like a whisper as it curled through the room. Loki followed, flapping far less often. 

Stephen wasn’t sure why it always seemed to be butterflies. He could have conjured anything, but he hadn’t thought twice; why not a butterfly? What else would it be? It felt so right, for reasons he couldn’t describe. His magic was quick, colorful, violent on occasion, lighter than air, and seeking sweet sustenance throughout the multiverse around him. He supposed he was like that, too. 

The illusion looked real—Stephen wasn’t an amateur, after all. But as it flew, he allowed his magic to slip, just slightly. The butterfly’s wings began to scintillate, fading between russet and purple, between gold and teal. The patterns on Loki’s wings began to change, also. But he couldn’t seem to shift colors, not as effortlessly as Stephen’s illusion, and settled for twisting in tandem with the butterfly instead. 

Stephen lifted a hand, waving his fingers to direct the energy once more. His butterfly elongated, shifted, until it was a hazel bat moving in jagged spirals. Loki matched it.

Just as quickly, Stephen cast the illusion into a quick songbird, an energetic rabbit, a green-grey fox. Loki slipped between his forms, pouncing and bounding in the trail of static crackling behind Stephen’s illusion. The creatures curled, little whispers of home mixed with the flavor of a thousand worlds, in a strange and elegant dance. 

The training room flickered with light, and Stephen’s song of the day was playing once again, and shaking hands stilled in their fluttering concentration, and Stephen smiled, just slightly. 

He wasn’t alone here. Perhaps he didn’t have to be lonely, either. 

  
  
  
  


 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Sorcerers Having Fun. For your safety, please keep any flammable or electronic objects at an appropriate distance.


End file.
